THE

FALCON FAMILY;

OR,

YOUNG IRELAND.

Rennie on Bird-Architecture.

THE FALCONS ON THE WING-CONSTERNATION OF MARYLEBONE--A THREATENING LETTER-THE RED ROVER AND THE GIPSY--VISITATION OF THE REV. DR. KOBART-THE FREEMANS SURRENDER AT DISCRETION-SPUNGES AND THEIR CORRELATIVES--USE OF THE METALS IN THE ECONOMY OF HUMAN LIFE.

TOWARDS the middle of the month of May, not three years since, a lively sensation was produced in a circle of respectable families mostly residen333t in Mar ylebone, by the sudden arrival in town of a family of the high­flying name of Falcon.

The sensation, upon the whole, was decidedly alarm­ing. The Puddicomes, of Wimpole-street, quaked; the

Jenkinsons, of Portland-place, were fluttered; a family of Duckworths retreated to Norwood; and the Bompases, of Bryanston-square, were divided between burn­ing their house and starting upon a continental tour.

Yet it was neither upon the Puddicomes, the Bom-pases, the Duckworths, or the Jenkinsons, that the Falcons first stooped. The house of a Mr. Freeman, in Harley-street, was the primary object of attack, and the Freemans had no ground for complaining of want of notice, as the following letter, received a few days before by Mrs. Freeman, from Mrs. Falcon, will satis­factorily show.

"Broomfield, Stony-Stratford, May 25.

"my dear mrs. freeman,

"We are all charmed to hear you are going to Plymouth next week; the country will do you and dear Mr. Freeman so much good. I hope and trust he will benefit by the change of air and the salt water. Lady Charlotte Nostrum makes it a rule to go to Plymouth for three months after every course of the London doctors, and it infallibly sets her up, and enables her to go through it all over again the next season. Just think of our misery, obliged to go to town just when other people are thinking of leaving it, and when town is beginning to be downright odious, The Sympletones will never forgive us for running away from them so soon, but Mr. Falcon has business in London which requires his immediate presence, so we must submit to our hard fate. The Shycocks are looking out for a small house for us somewhere near

St. John's Wood, or the Bayswater-road; but if you should hear of anything (quite perfect) that would suit us elsewhere-in the cottage-style, you know, with just one coach-house, or without one (we have no horses just now)-pray do let us know before you leave town. I am perfectly ashamed to put you to this trouble, dear Mrs. Freeman, but you are always good­ness itself to us, and I know you will excuse,

"Yours, with a thousand loves,

"GEORGINA FALCON.

"P.S. How are your dear sweet girls?-should we not succeed in getting a house, would it be too unrea­sonable to beg of you, if perfectly convenient, to allow Mr. Falcon and me (nobody else), to sleep a night or two in Harley-street, until we suit ourselves? Any hole or corner would answer us. But if it would put you to slightest trouble it would make us all perfectly wretched. Remember to inquire at Plymouth for Dr. Pinch; he performs miracles by just throwing a grain of some wonderful powder into the sea, just before his patients bathe; he calls it pathetic mesmerism, or some­thing like that.

"To Mrs. Freeman, Harley-street,London."

The lady to whom this familiar and elegant epistle was addressed, was not at all deficient in simplicity; but, nevertheless, she comprehended its drift the instant she read it. She knew that Mrs. Falcon had no more intention of taking a house in town than Queen Pomare had, and understood the request in the post­script as a distinct announcement, on the part of the

Falcon family, of their resolution to quarter themselves in Harley-street, rent-free, for the summer months.

"I suppose we must submit, my dear?" said Mrs. Freeman to her husband, looking, as she spoke, the very picture of abused good-nature.

"I suppose so," said Mr. Freeman, with the half peevish, half indifferent air of a poco-curante invalid. "I'll certainly try Dr. Pinch."

"But it is provoking, just now, when every thing is laid up; the carpets off, the curtains down; no servants -no coals."

So much the better," said Mr. Freeman.

"As there will be only Mr. and Mrs. Falcon, I suppose I need not lock up the bronzes and alabasters?" said the lady.

"No necessity," said the gentleman. "I wish I had heard of Dr. Pinch before."

"They must be very poor, my dear," resumed Mrs. Freeman, beginning to think more of the inconve­niences the Falcons would be subjected to, than of those to which their visitation would occasion herself.

Mr. Freeman shook his head, took an infinitesimal pill, medicine enough for an infinitesimal disorder, and made no answer but an infinitesimal grunt.

"Have they anything at all, my dear?"

"Falcon has generally some little agency, or tem­porary employment."

"To be sure," said Mrs. Freeman, "they must live for almost nothing."

Mr. Freeman took a second homoeopathic pill, gave a second homoeopathic grunt, and said, "They save

house-rent, servants' wages, poor's-rates, assessed taxes. People always do by living in other people's houses. But it was thoughtful of Mrs. Falcon to mention Dr. Pinch."

At this point of the conjugal dialogue Mrs. Free­man's brother, Dick Chatworth, a spruce, chirping, middle-aged bachelor, smartly dressed, with a profusion of jewellery, dropped in, and laughed heartily when he heard of the threatened invasion of the Falcons.

"You know the Falcons, Dick?" said his sister.

"Know them! to be sure I do-by reputation. Every body knows them, and most people to their cost; they call Falcon the 'Red Rover,' and the lady goes by the name of 'The Gipsy.' "

"She's a brunette," said Mr. Freeman.

"She has all the gipsy peculiarities: the brown complexion, the vagrant habits, and the loose morality: she's Egyptian all over; a handsome strolling beggar; and she speaks such delicious French! But have you answered her letter, Elizabeth?-take care what you do!"

"Why, we can't refuse, Dick, they are such friends of the Bompases."

"Friends of the Bompases!-the Bompases have the greatest horror of them. All I say is, take care Mrs. Falcon is not in a certain interesting situation!"

"Good Heaven! is it possible she wants to be con-fined here?"

"She managed to be confined at the Rev. Dr. Hobart's, in Dover-street, a few years ago, to my own

knowledge; so look sharp, Elizabeth-take a friend's advice."

"I should have to pay for the straw," said Mr. Free­man.

"Poor Hobart paid the doctor, and 'faith, I believe, he also paid for the cradle. Besides, he was forced to stay at the 'Blenheim,' in Bond-street, for two months-I used to dine with him there."

"Well-if ever!" exclaimed Mrs. Freeman, with up­lifted hands.

"How did Hobart stand it?" inquired Mr. Freeman.

"Wonderfully. At the same time he did not quite like it-a bachelor and a clergyman, you know-peo­ple made remarks when they saw the outward and visi­ble signs of an accouchement at his house; but what he thought worst of was being obliged to stand godfather to the gipsy's brat, and present the nurse with a guinea. To be sure, Mrs. Falcon was very grateful: the child was christened Hobart!"

People like the Hobarts and Freemans are as neces­sary to people like the Falcons as argosies are to corsairs, or caravans to Arabian banditti. Your easy, good-natured people are the correlatives of spunges and land-pirates. Good temper, generosity, and facility of dis­position are frequently expensive accomplishments; and no man ought to start in life with them, any more than set up his coach, without a careful examination of the state of his finances.

Mrs. Freeman could not bring herself to disoblige friends of the Bompases;-however, she made inquiries

about Mrs. Falcon's times and seasons of gestation, and the result being satisfactory, she returned her a complaisant answer, to the effect that a room or two in Harley-street would be at her service for a fortnight; but she regret­ted that she could not offer such poor accommodation for a longer time, as there were repairs to be done, and carpenters and painters to be employed during the summer. Mrs. Freeman, too, had her postscript; but it was merely to recommend to Mrs. Falcon's parti­cular care a valuable and beautiful alabaster Diana in one of the drawing-rooms. The next day the Free-mans left town for Plymouth, leaving their house in the custody of two trusty domestics, to whom Dick Chatworth gave a shrewd hint not to divulge the name of the family coal-factor, and to be equally mysterious as to that of the baker and butcher.

"Success to the daring," he said to himself, as he left his sister's house, after giving these prudent direc­tions. "There is no getting on in this world without gold in the pocket, iron in the hand, silver on the tongue, or brass on the forehead;-Mrs. Falcon has got the silver and the brass, at all events."

"Sure in some countries Ladies are privy-councillors and more, Are they not, think ye? There the land is doubtless Most politicly govern'd; where the women Are crown'd wives and sceptre-bearing mothers, Such states are nourishing."

Massinger's "Fancies Chaste and Noble."

mrs. falcon's veracity-the arrival-portrait of the gipsy -a woman without a master-other family pictures- "attractions of the falcons-how mr. falcon won his way-HOW MRS. FALCON CARRIED HER POINTS-HOW LUCY IMPROVED HER MIND, AND HOW EMILY LOST EDEN.

"mr. falcon and myself-nobody else," those were the words of Mrs. Falcon's pregnant postcript. Oh, fie! Mrs. Falcon, you knew very well that your storm-ing party was to include your two pretty daughters, Emily and Lucy; with that eight-year-old imp of yours, wicked Willy in his Scottish costume; fie, Mrs. Falcon, where did you leave your veracity, where did you pick up your morals?

At a late hour in the evening, but before dark, a coach drove up to Mr. Freeman's house, and there was no extravagant eagerness on the part of the servants to open the door for the knocker was appealed to thrice, and thrice did the bell ring, before there was any reply to the besiegers' summons.

"While Mr. Falcon (little assisted by the domestics) was engaged in extracting numerous parcels from the pockets and other receptacles of the coach, Mrs. Falcon

stood on the flags, superintending the transportation of her goods and chattels; and the imperious tone in which she gave her minute directions as well as the petulant way in which she occasionally flung aside her luxuriant black hair, which travelling had thrown into disorder, showed clearly that there was at least one Woman in the world who acknowledged no Master.

"I don't see my cul-de-sac-oh, it's under the cushion where I was sitting; there, just under your hand."

"Sac-de-nuit, mamma," said one of the girls very quietly, as she stepped out of the carriage.

"Count the hampers, Mr. Falcon," continued the mother, not seeming to attend to the correction of her French; "there ought to be three; one, two, the other is on the top; all right. Where are the rabbits?"

"In papa's boots, ma," answered wicked Willy al­ready alluded to.

"I ordered you, sirrah, this morning, to see them put in the boot of the carriage, not in your papa's boots. Do take off your hat, Mr. Falcon, you can't put your head far enough into the boot with your hat on."

Nobody who heard or saw Mrs. Falcon, as she stood thus issuing her orders to every body round her, could doubt for a moment that she was commander-in-chief of the squadron. She was a woman in the August of her days; brisk and blooming, with black hair and brown complexion, her nose slightly aquiline, her lips small and compressed; her eyes dark, piercing, bold, practical; her features in general regular and massive, with a free and daring expression, which had a charm of its own for those who like what the French call une beaute insolente. She was above the middle height, and looked even taller

than she actually was, in consequence of her remarkably stately and commanding carriage, a point to which, perhaps, she paid the more attention, as it was the only carriage she could call her own. All the developments of her person were on a large scale; she wanted no milliner's assistance to help her to bustle through the world; and notwithstanding the intelligence which Mrs. Freeman received upon a certain delicate question, there were manifest indications about the bouncing gipsy, of a nature to alarm her friends and acquaint­ance, particularly the Rev. Mr. Hobart.

Falcon was alarming too, after a fashion of his own. He looked alarmingly hungry! Probably it was in the larders of Marylebone that his arrival was most dreaded. Imagine a famished, but tame wolf, and it will give some notion of the expression of his sharp, ravenous, but mild and subdued physiognomy. He was very tall and meagre; his nose was red and hooked; his eyes twinkling and intelligent; his forehead high, narrow, receding, bald, garnished on each side with an upright tuft of reddish hair; for, in obedience to his wife's mandate, he had taken off his hat, which certainly ena­bled him; to poke his head more conveniently into the various nooks and pouches where any property of the family might possibly be latent.

As to the girls, they were both very pretty, and pretty girls are often alarming personages. Otherwise, why any place in the world should have been thrown into consternation by either Emily or Lucy Falcon, seemed difficult to understand. To be sure, Lucy was a miniature of her mother, a piratical beauty, like Haidee, which may account, in some degree, for the

feeling in her case; but the other girl was of a different order altogether. She seemed, at least, beside her sister, one of those

"Maidens never bold, Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion Blush'd at herself."

Perhaps she had some other qualities (hereafter to be disclosed), in common with the daughter of Brabantio, but it is only necessary to add here that she was a charming blonde, of eighteen or nineteen, with deep blue eyes, dark hair, and a figure slighter than her sister's, but exquisitely formed.

The truth, indeed, was, and it is only fair to state it at once-that while collectively this vagrant family were regarded with apprehension, sometimes amounting to terror, there was no member of it (except the juniors of the masculine gender, who had yet to learn the politics of their tribe) who was not popular in some quar­ter or another; who had not a party, or at least, a faction, in his or in her interest, wherever the mother Falcon ordered their flight.

Mr. Falcon was an immense favourite with little England; he was the school-boy's architect and ship­builder, and Master of the Ordnance to the British Nursery; incomparable at making cannon with quills, mortars of trotter bones, armadas of old corks, and armies out of visiting-tickets. Then, for children who were sager than to play with any thing but the toys of philosophy, he could suffocate canaries in exhausted, receivers, develop electric sparks from the bristling backs of reluctant kittens, exhibit the laws of refraction with a slop-basin and a teaspoon, and seduce needles

out of work-boxes with a magnet of amazing virtue, which he always carried in his waistcoat pocket. In a word, he was the darling of the darlings; secured the nurseries first, and there planted the artillery with which he often carried the dining-room; which was, of course, the main point.

Mrs. Falcon had the usual success that follows the steps of a fine and a clever woman, where she had not the sharpness or the jealousy of her own sex to cope with. Wherever male influence was ascendent, the gipsy was seldom repulsed, and often re­ceived with hearty welcome. What man, who had either the eye of a Rubens for florid beauty, or the taste of a Borrow for Zinganee adventure, could con­template either her person or her character without admiration? In houses where petticoat government was established, she had a more difficult card to play; and she relied, of course, upon her intellectual re-sources and diplomatic abilities altogether. Lucy, the brown, girl, was playful and sprightly, with an agree­able knack of attracting the attention of governesses and masters, wherever she went; by which she not only improved herself, but often gratified the truant young ladies of her acquaintance, who preferred battledore and shuttlecock to counterpoint, or Mrs. Gore's novels to the German grammar.

Emily Falcon had the largest party of all; indeed, she was everywhere received with open arms, except in houses where loveliness and merit are positive grounds of exclusion; for in this world as well as in the next, are joyless mansions, not made to be lit by beauty or inhabited by worth.

"Puppy.-What sort or order of gipsies, I pray, sir? Cockrell.-A gipsy of quality, believe it. Townshead.-'Fore me, a dainty derived gipsy."

BenJonson--"TheGipsies Metamorphosed."

ANTECEDENTS OF MRS. FALCON-HER PATRICIAN BIRTH AND ARISTOCRATIC EDUCATION-HOW SHE RAMBLED ABOUT, AND WHAT SHE PICKED UP IN HER RAMBLES-HER METAMORPHOSIS INTO A MAGPIE-HOW POPULAR SHE BECAME WITH THE MIDDLE CLASSES-WHO FOUGHT FOR HER AND WHO WON HER-ANTECEDENTS OF MR. FALCON-VICISSITUDES OF HIS NOSE-HIS EDUCATION, CHARACTER, MIGRATIONS, AND PROPENSITIES.

MRS. FALCON had been, in her maiden estate, a Miss Georgina, Hawke, the daughter of a dissipated clergyman and the niece of a profligate peer, who had passed from the House of Lords into the bankrupts' calendar in consequence of his patrician propensity to deal in horse-flesh. Lively and handsome, indif-ferently educated, and loosely principled (having lost her mother at a very early age), the brown Georgina passed the first twenty years of her life wandering up and down the British dominions, in a sort of aristo­cratic vagrancy, transmitted from house to house, for­warded from uncle to aunt, tossed from one cousin to another, generally received with welcome, because, beside being a relative, she was pretty and entertain­ing, but as commonly parted with (when she was not unceremoniously packed off) with equal or greater

alacrity, in consequence of an amiable, and in her case a pardonable tendency to overtax the hospitalities of her friends and relations. Under these unfavourable circumstances, leading this vagabond life, the de­ficiencies she laboured under in the refinements and accomplishments of ladies of her social rank, were any thing but surprising. A tomboy at twelve, she was an Amazon at twenty; and those free, rollicking manners, which made her popular enough with country gentle­men, rendered her proportionally formidable to her own sex, particularly to mothers who had daughters to bring up and out, of an age to be influenced by bad example. However, she managed to pick up as she jogged along, a scrap of an accomplishment here, and a sprig of useful knowledge there. She could never remember where she got her music; and Heaven only knew where she acquired the little French she pos­sessed; and of which she was apt to make an adven­turous and amusing display. But she was accused of picking up other things, as well as information, on her rambles; and in truth she was from the outset a little predatory, as well as migratory, in her habits; that is to say, she did not participate in all the respect that judges and lawyers express for the rights of property; or perhaps she inclined to the primitive Christian system of community of goods. Her moral delin­quencies, however, were generally taken in good part; her relatives and connexions were as often entertained as annoyed by her petty larcenies; and sometimes they even laughed heartily, as they screamed, "A la voleuse! A la voleuse!" when the daughter of the

parson and niece of the lord trooped off in their satin, boots, or marched away in their Cashmere shawls. Considering that, amongst other houses, she had occa­sionally sojourned in those of dignitaries of the church, and even in episcopal palaces, it was marvellous that Georgina Hawke's organ of conscientiousness had not been better developed, and very curious, too, that she should evince, as she always did, a particular fancy for matters of gold and silver. But never could she resist the temptations of loose bijouterie; and numerous were the occasions when vanished thimbles missing pencil-cases, and rings or bracelets supposed to be in the crucible or in the moon, were accidentally discovered, in the recesses of her reticule, or the oubliette of some still more roguish privy pocket.

Miss Hawke, in fact, was an Autolycus in petticoats, "littered under Mercury," a "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles;" for, having a shrewd gift of observa­tion, she had remarked in her tenderest years the thousand "waifs and strays" (as lawyers phrase it) in the forms of combs, caps, aprons, chains, fans, feathers, veils, garters, flowers-the accumulations of bygone seasons, and the debris of fashions out of date-which, strew and encumber the bed-rooms and boudoirs of her sex, as leaves do the brooks in autumn; and perhaps she observed, too, that the hands of the lady's-maid are unequal in every case to the clearing away of all this gay rubbish. At any rate she was a match for any lady's-maid in the land at this species of Augean labour; but even when she pounced upon articles of greater value, a diamond brooch, or a braid of pearls,

how often did she redeem the act of temporary felony (in the opinion of all but the party plundered) by the transfer to a very pretty neck of what was destined to deck a very plain one?

Upon the whole, it was a question whether our hawk, turned "la pie voleuse" (for her girlhood was so nicknamed), was more admired than feared. She certainly did produce more or less alarm wherever she showed her handsome brazen face; and ere she attained her seventeenth year, there was a desire very generally felt and expressed to see her married and settled in the world.

At length she was thrown, by one of the changes and chances of a roving life, into a mercantile circle in some town in the north of England; and from that hour she may be said to have become the undisputed property of the middle classes. Then, for the first time, she found herself a personage, and discovered the import­ance in England of being allied even to nobility under a cloud. Could she have minced herself into twenty pieces, there would not have been enough of the lord's niece for the excellent people into whose society she was now cast. Cotton and hard-ware fought for her: she was the desire of the potteries, the idol of the power-looms, and the goddess of those who dealt in crockery. Now an iron-master carried her off to Bir­mingham; now the stocking-weavers of Nottingham possessed her; she was the pride of Kidderminster, the mania of Manchester, and the love of Leeds. There came matrimonial offers in the course of things:-indigos proposed; teas paid their addresses; wine wooed,

and cutlery courted her. It ended as such matters end frequently, in her intermarrying neither with china, cutlery, teas, wine, nor indigo. Suddenly-marvel­lously, mysteriously-she committed matrimony one foggy morning with a moss-trooping adventurer like herself. In short, never was there a more suitable union in point of character, or a more hazardous one in point of prudence, than that of Georgina Hawke to the ingenious Mr. Peregrine Falcon.

To the dismay of her patrician kindred she now re­appeared at their houses in town, and their halls in the country, presenting them with her straggling, eccentric husband. His picture has been already drawn; it is only necessary to add here, that his nose was not uni­formly pink, but changed colour with the seasons;- pink in spring, red in summer, purple in autumn, and in winter something between blue and crimson. The feature was the more important, because his nose was the only thing about Mr. Falcon that seemed to flourish. His person was a precise antithesis to his wife's: a shil­ling pamphlet on Poor Laws by Ridgway beside a thumping quarto Book of Beauty, by Heath.

Falcon, however, resembled his spouse in being equally self-educated. Whatever were his intellectual deficiencies, he did not owe them to the systems of Eton and Harrow. He was a living proof that a man may be shallow, without being indebted to Cambridge, or under the slightest obligation to Oxford. Busy rather than industrious; volatile rather than active, cleverish ra­ther than clever;-he had been in fifty different offices

in half that number of years; for all through life he was "the gentleman in search of a situation." He re­membered the time when he had been a clerk at So­merset House; he had once superintended a copper-mine; he had managed a lunatic asylum; controlled the accounts of a national cow-pock institution, super­vised port duties, been secretary to a horticultural as­sociation, and acted as deputy librarian to the British Museum; and he had now just resigned the place of inspector of works to a new railway company, which he had only filled for three weeks, with a view to obtain the appointment of secretary to the Irish Branch So­ciety for the Conversion of Polish Jews. His employers had generally a high opinion of his talents for a month, or so, but they usually got tired of him before the end of a second; and if they did not, he got weary of them before the expiration of a third; and thus the engage­ment very rarely lasted for half a year. The conse­quence, however, of this multifarious life was that he knew a little of every thing knowable, and something of everybody in England. He passed, upon twenty subjects, for a very learned man amongst people who knew nothing at all about them; in mathematics he had crossed the ass's bridge, peeped into the angles of a parallelogram, and nibbled a little at square roots; he was geologist enough to talk of conglomerate and to be up to trap; his botany qualified him to speak of the petals of a rose, the stamina of a tulip, and the nectary of a snap-dragon; he knew the alphabets of several lan­guages, and had "a little Latin and less Greek," like 23

his illustrious countryman, William Shakspeare; so that, upon the whole, he was not one of the least accom­plished smatterers of the smattering age we live in.

In the course of his many-coloured life he had nu­merous opportunities of conferring little official favours and obligations on a variety of people, and he had used these opportunities with tolerable dexterity and effect (if not always with the strictest regard to probity), so as to make a considerable number of friends, not in the sentimental sense of the word, but in its most practical, economical, and fiscal signification.

Such was the pair which had now roamed the world, without certain income or fixed residence, with various fortunes and few misfortunes, not always hand in hand, but still conjugally united, for nearly twenty years; living none knew how, yet living tolerably well; dwell­ing none knew where, yet never very badly housed; eat­ing, drinking, and sleeping better than nine-tenths of her majesty's subjects, yet seldom paying a butcher's bill, very rarely a wine-merchant's, and never a landlord or a tax-collector. Meanwhile, they had scrupulously obeyed the first rule of Nature's arithmetic; the law of multiplication. Besides the two daughters and the son already mentioned, they had another girl named Paulina, and an elder boy, Pickever Falcon, who was heir to the family estates in Airshire, and the patrimo­nial castle in the Isle of Sky.

"The early bird gets the worm."

Old Proverb,

"I'll example you with thievery."

Timon of Athens.

MRS. FALCON RISES WITH THE LARK-HER APPROPRIATION CLAWS AND MATERNAL ACTIVITY-OBSERVATIONS ON MR. FALCON'S NOSE-LARCENIES OF LUCY-THE GIPSY A FREE-TRADER-HER PASSION FOR ITALY-COMPARISON OF MR. FALCON TO THE COUNT D'ORSAY-BLEAK PROSPECTS OF BREAKFAST--A SAUCY DOMESTIC-HOW THE PROSPECTS BRIGHTENED, AND WHO BRIGHTENED THEM.

at an early hour on the morning that followed her arrival in town, Mrs. Falcon, the most strenuous of her sex, was up and stirring, fresh and vigorous as if she had undergone no fatigue on the preceding day. When a woman of her energetic character is once out of bed, it is the vanity of vanities for the members of her family to think of enjoying themselves in it. She first dressed herself for the day, and in doing so, she did not scruple to avail herself of an excellent pair of stays be­longing to Mrs. Freeman, whose bed-room she occu­pied; she first tried them on out of mere curiosity, and then finding they fitted her magnificent bust to ad­miration, she thought it was not worth while to change them for her own. Perhaps she desired to test the truth of the Shakspearian adage, that "every true

man's apparel fits your thief," or to try whether it applied equally to articles of feminine attire.

"It can do them no harm, to wear them for one day," she observed, coolly, revolving superbly as she spoke before a large mirror, and surveying the appro­priated corset over her plump shoulder.

"Not the least, my dear," replied her husband, who was still in bed, lying musingly on his back, presenting a subject to tempt a caricaturist, with his red nose, and a nightcap of the same flaming colour.

"I beg you will get up, Mr. Falcon; there is a vast deal to be done to-day, but I suppose I must do every thing as usual; dear me, how red your nose is this morning."

Mrs. Falcon next rang the bell for one of the maids to dress her promising son, Willy.

"There's no use, my dear, in ringing the bell in this house," said Falcon, sitting up and sedately doffing his red nightcap.

"Not much, indeed; I never saw such inattentive impertinent servants; however, I won't submit to it," and Mrs. Falcon rang the bell a second time a little vixenishly.

"My nose is red this morning," observed Falcon, now risen, and contemplating that imposing feature attentively in the looking-glass.

"Pray stand out of my way; and do be so good as to dress yourself, and look at your nose afterwards; I see I must dress Willy myself this morning. I wonder what servants are paid for."

And the gipsy having completed her toilet, which

was smart and distinguished (although the details were perhaps a little incongruous, as if they did not belong to the same epoch of fashion, or were not the result of a single creative effort of millinery mind), hurried first to her daughters' room to see that they were in motion, and then proceeded to Master Willy's dormitory, where, with maternal vigour and intelli­gence, she discharged the various functions of the nur­sery, not unmixed with a few piquant personalities to overcome the varlet's aversion to practical hydropathy, and also by way of salutary admonition to refrain his little Gothic paws from the marbles, bronzes, and ala­basters, more especially the beautiful Diana, on which Mrs. Freeman set particular value.

Meantime her daughters were also at their toilets; and Lucy, the brunette, availed herself, after the ma­ternal example, of sundry odds and ends of lace and ribbon, and one or two small articles of jewellery, upon which it was evident Mr. Freeman's daughters set mo great value; but at any rate a chain or a bracelet would not be the worse for being worn for a day or two on the neck or arm of Lucy Falcon. The other girl, the blonde, seemed either not so dressy or not so larcenous; for she attired herself in a plain white frock taken from her travelling wardrobe, arranged her golden hair in massy braids upon each side of her fair face, and left the bower where she had passed the night, without any more serious depredation than the use of a pin.

Mrs. Falcon, her brown daughter, and her male chick, then proceeded on a little morning cruise, not

without practical objects, for the gipsy was a woman, of business every inch. Bearing down Oxford-street on a trade-wind, she negotiated a little affair of Hyson and Congo at the London and Canton Tea Warehouse. Shortly afterwards she drew up in front of a superb magazine of groceries, seemed greatly smitten by the sparkling whiteness of certain loaves of sugar, and in a wonderfully short time concluded another commercial treaty with the man of figs and nutmegs. There now fell a smart shower: was it the spell that resides in the name of Italy that drove Mrs. Falcon to take shelter in an "Italian Warehouse?" It is just possible that she thought of the land of statues, pictures, and blue skies; but by some degrees more probable that Italy presented itself to her imagination as the country of cheeses, sausages, and maccaroni-that she thought more of Parma, Bologna, and Naples, than of Venice, Rome, and Florence. At all events she transacted a little business in the Italian, as well as in the Chinese and Jamaica trade, before she returned to breakfast.

Meanwhile, Mr. Falcon, although he had admo­nished his wife that it was vain to expect attendance from the servants, found it so desirable to have hot water for the process of shaving, that he made several tintinnabulatory attempts to attract the attention of the household. At length, by dint of perseverance, he succeeded in procuring some water of Laodicean tem­perature; and having made the best shift he could to reap his long chin by its assistance, he joined his daugh­ter Emily in the drawing-room, looking as bleak as if he had made his toilet on an iceberg, or at least, at the

Hospice of St. Bernard. His black coat was severely brushed, and buttoned sharply up to his throat; not a trace of shirt was visible over his somewhat bolstery white cravat; his ancient ducks (which seemed the ori­ginal pair, or first parents of the Russian family of trousers) were clean, but much too short for a man of his height, exposing to view nearly the whole length of his veteran boots, which were probably (to make them fit company for the ducks) the first pair that ever bore the name of Wellington. On the whole, the simple and amiable Mr. Peregrine Falcon, when his toilet was most complete, looked very unlike Count d'Or-say, but strongly suggested the idea of a bankrupt bookseller, an insolvent teacher of geography and the use of the globes, or (saving the ducks) the working curate of an Irish pluralist parson.

Falcon received his daughter's salutations affec­tionately, but was rather laconic in returning them; in fact, he loved to jump from his bed-room to the break­fast-table, or, as the old French proverb expresses it? "faire le saut d'Allemand." It was his daily remark that he was good for nothing before breakfast, and many people thought he was not good for much after it. At all events he was a great breakfast eater; and he now trundled down stairs, like a father-long-legs carrying an express, to see what preparations had been made for the matin meal. But the parlour pre­sented him with a fearfully blank prospect; he darted his hungry eyes into every corner of the room, without discovering provisions enough to regale a church-mouse. The tea-caddies were invitingly open, but repulsively

empty; he peeped into a sarcophagus, and found it as vacant as if Belzoni had ransacked it. The "Vestiges of Creation" lay on the mantel-piece; but Falcon, although a dabbler in geology, would have infinitely preferred at that moment the vestiges of a pigeon-pie, or the fossil remains of a cold ham. He was retreating "slowly and sadly," when a smart female domestic, neatly aproned, and sprucely capped and ribboned, whisked into the room, threw down several parcels upon the side-board, and whisked out again as dis­respectfully as she had entered.

"Samples," said Falcon to himself, examining the parcels, and brightening as he proceeded in the exami­nation, "samples of teas and sugars. What's this in the large parcel? Bologna sausage, orange marmalade, and Yarmouth bloaters." Before he came to the end of this short soliloquy, he looked sunny as the clime from which the sausage came.

The smart maid re-entered. It was merely to say, that the boy who had brought the samples of tea desired to know when he was to call again for "the large order!"

"After breakfast-in the course of the day-any time-the things must be tried, you know-tell him your mistress is not at home," said Falcon, in a state of considerable indecision.

"My mistress!" repeated the girl in her sauciest tone.

"Oh, did I say your mistress? I meant mine" said Falcon, with a facetiousness intended to mollify the nymph of the brush.

30

"Oh, indeed!" returned the hussy with an imper­tinent toss of her head; and just at the same instant, a knock at the hall-door was heard, and Mrs. Falcon presently strutted in, blooming from her morning exer­cise; the impudent housemaid perusing and scrutinising her from head to foot, as if she were looking for Mrs. Freeman's stays under the gipsy's black velvet gown.

"There is a boy waiting, my dear," said Falcon, "for directions about these samples."

"Oh, I saw him at the door-I have given him his answer."

Then, turning to the seemingly impracticable domes­tic, she gave the necessary orders about breakfast, in a tone of bland dignity, which nobody knew better how to assume when occasion required it; and the desired effect was wrought, for in less than half-an-hour, the Falcons sat down to a tolerably good breakfast, for which they were mainly indebted to the early rising and commercial talents and activity of the lordliest of wives, and most executive of mothers.

The tea was highly commended; but whether the London and Canton Tea Warehouse in Oxford-street ever received the "large order," is not a fact sufficiently well established to justify the cautious historian in stating it with confidence.

" Jolly, jolly rover, here's one who lives in clover: Who finds the clover? The jolly, jolly rover. He finds the clover, let him then come over, The jolly, jolly rover, over, over, over."

Old Song.

MR. FALCON SEES BEYOND HIS NOSE-MRS. FALCON SEES FURTHER-LES ENFANS PERDUS-DINNER AND LUNCHEON ARRANGEMENTS-THE GIPSY ON THE SIN OF INGRATITUDE-CHEAP LESSONS IN DRAW­ING-mrs. falcon's idea of plutarch's lives-a conjugal CANNONADE-MR. FALCON ON FORTIFICATIONS-MRS. FALCON'S NOTION OF SIEGES AND SACKS-EMILY'S METHOD WITH IRISH LANDLORDS-WHAT MR. FALCON STUFFED HIS CRAVAT WITH, AND HOW MASTER W. FALCON LEARNED HIS CATECHISM.

"where do we dine to-day?" said Falcon, re­spectfully, to the governess-general, as he finished his second bloater, and was fixing amorous eyes upon a third.

Mr. Falcon had been more attentive all his life to the present tense than to the future; but he could see beyond his nose, and as that was a long one, he cannot be said to have wanted forecast: in fact, he could just peep five or six hours into futurity, a modicum of provisional talent which he daily exhibited, by making arrangements for dinner before he rose from the breakfast-table. His abler and deeper spouse not only provided for the exigencies of the day, but extended her views, like a consummate general, or profound

financier, to the demands and necessities of the morrow. But then she was a gipsy, and had the prophetic as well as the predatory spirit of Egypt. Mrs. Falcon's eye could look into the next season.

"I suppose either with the Puddicomes or the Ropers-those dear Ropers!-it is so long since we have been with them. At the same time, we must not neglect the Puddicomes-oh! and the Bompases!-our own relations-I was quite forgetting them, and my poor Paulina still with them. Lucy, hold up your head,-tete monte, my dear."

"Paulina!" exclaimed Falcon; " I thought Paulina was with the Owen Lloyds in Denbighshire."

Emily and Lucy laughed.

"How very strange, Mr. Falcon, you never do know where your children are."

Falcon could have given very good reasons for the difficulty, under which he occasionally laboured, to recollect in what parts of the kingdom, and in what houses, the several little scatterlings of his family were billeted, at any given time; but Mrs. Falcon was not in the habit of giving his reasons an audience, and accordingly he seldom pressed them on her attention.

"Papa, where is Pickever?" asked Lucy, with a roguish twinkle of her black eye, glancing at her mother and then at Emily.

Falcon helped himself to the third Yarmouth, and pretended not to hear his pert minx of a daughter.

"My poor Pickever!" said the gipsy, with maternal tenderness; "he is very provoking not to write to me. I hope the Smarts are good to him. Lady Smart promised me-what are you giggling at, girls?"

33

"Lady Smart! mamma," exclaimed both her daugh­ters together, and both laughing. "You are as bad as papa. Pickever is with the Horngreens at Weymouth."

"Oh, to be sure he is-what was I thinking of? I never could remember the names of persons and places. My poor Pickever! he left the Smarts because the boys were all so mean about their ponies-they must ride themselves-just as selfish as their odious mother."

"Where shall we lunch?" asked Falcon, rejoining the conversation with some spirit, encouraged by the discovery that his wife was as much at a loss about Pickever's whereabout as he had been about Paulina's.

"I'll tell you my plans, Mr. Falcon," replied his wife, in her lofty way, only wanting a sceptre in her hand to make her look like a czarina. "I shall dine to-day with the excellent Puddicomes, and lunch with the poor Ropers. To-morrow I shall devote to the Bompases; their house is the most convenient in Lon­don; and, to do them justice, they have been all kind­ness and attention to Paulina. I positively won't neglect them." And then Mrs. Falcon delivered an edifying homily on the sin of ingratitude, the practical conclusion from which (or "improvement" as divines call it) was, that when people have done us a signal service, it is our duty, as good Christians, to seize the earliest opportunity of dining, or at least lunching, at their house.

Falcon ventured to suggest that it would be better to take the Bompases first, as his daughter was with them, and he felt a natural parental yearning to see

her again-now that she was recalled to his recol­lection!

"No," said the head of the executive, with decision; "my plan is the best-leave it all to me. Mr. Tinto, who paints so beautifully in water-colours, is attending the Puddicomes, and I wish Lucy to resume her draw­ing-lessons; it's an excellent opportunity. I have no notion of paying masters myself for mere accomplish­ments-we can't afford it. Really, Mr. Falcon, it would be no harm if you thought a little more than you do about the education of your children; you throw every thing on me-it would kill any body else. I positively ought to have as many lives as a cat, or Plutarch."

"Plutarch, my dear-"and the erudite Mr. Falcon was about to correct (with becoming modesty, how­ever) the literary mistake under which his wife seemed to labour respecting Plutarch's lives.

"Now, I don't want to have Plutarch's history, Mr. Falcon-how very learned you are! How can you eat all that salt-fish! What a monstrous cravat you have got! did you put the bolster in it? Never mind it now -you will only make it worse. What do you propose to do, pray? Willy! fingers out of the marmalade!"

Falcon was so confounded by this sharp cannonade, opened so unexpectedly upon his learning, his appetite, and his toilet, that he hesitated and stammered a little before he was collected enough to reply-"Lunch with the Ropers, my dear, of course, as you propose, and dine-"

"There are other things to be thought of, I presume, besides lunching and dining, Mr. Falcon; I wish eat-

ing would make you fat, but I really think the more you eat the thinner you grow; if you ever intend to finish your breakfast, perhaps the sooner you make inquiries about those two appointments, the better."

"Papa, choose the place in London!" exclaimed Lucy.

"Papa, accept the appointment in Ireland!" cried Emily.

"What is the English situation?" demanded Mrs. Falcon.

"Connected with the woods and forests," replied her spouse.

"Woods and forests!-nonsense, Peregrine!-do you want to turn Robin Hood? I think I see you a forester!-Emily is wild enough, I think, as it is, with­out going to the woods to make her wilder; and as to Master Willy there, he would do nothing all day but gather blackberries."

"I am more disposed to the other place, I confess," replied the meek husband, not venturing to go into the explanation necessary to correct his wife's error respect­ing the department of the public service in question.

"I won't decide at present," said the gipsy-mother; "only recollect, Mr. Falcon, I positively won't go to Ireland, unless the situation is permanent, and the country quiet."

"Dublin is as safe as London, my dear," said Falcon; " indeed safer, if possible, for I am told it has lately been fortified. I know something about fortifica­tion. When I was deputy-storekeeper at the Tower-"

"I don't like the idea of living in fortified places," replied the mother Falcon, not waiting for the close of

this interesting chapter in her husband's life; "it's not pleasant to think of being besieged, sacked and ran­sacked. I have heard of women being sacked-they do it in Turkey constantly, and throw them into the Phosphorus. I'm not a coward, I flatter myself; I'm as stout as any woman, and I was never ashamed to own it-but I do like to be hors-de-combat." "Indeed, mamma," said Emily, "Ireland is quite as safe a country to live in as England; nobody is ever shot but a tyrannical landlord, occasionally."

"Occasionally!-upon my word, Miss Emily, you seem to think nothing of shooting people occasionally," said Mrs. Falcon, rising from the table, and simulta­neously boxing her son's ears for a repetition of his practices upon the sweetmeats.

"Well, I'm not a landlord," said Falcon, reluctantly rising too.

"If you were, papa, you would not be a tyrannical one," said his daughter Emily, smiling and kissing him; "but let me settle your cravat before you go out-it is positively frightful."

"Will you walk with me, Emily?" said Falcon, as with the prettiest of hands she untied the white mass that encircled his throat, in order to reduce within a reasonable compass, what was indeed a monstrous wisp of cambric.

"Yes, papa," she replied, unrolling the cravat; "but what have you stuffed it with?"

"I don't know, my dear; a stiffener I found in a corner of the bed-room."

"A stiffener!-ha, ha, ha!-mamma! Lucy! look at

papa's cravat-stiffener!" Emily held up a cushion in the form of a young moon, which probably belonged to Mrs. Freeman, and was not designed for that part of the person to which the innocent and ingenious Mr. Falcon had transferred it.

The gipsy and her daughters had a hearty laugh at his expense.

"My dear, I never saw one before," said poor Falcon; and his wife smiled at the observation, and patted his bald head good-humouredly, as she marched out of the breakfast-room, like the queen of the gipsies.

"Will you ever put your fingers in the marmalade again?" said she to her hopeful son, as they proceeded up stairs together.

"No, ma," said Willy.

"What did I teach you last Sunday morning?"

"To keep my tongue from picking and stealing, and my hands from evil sqeaking, lying, and slandering."

"Very well, love; and what did I tell you honesty was?"

"Politics, mamma."

"And where do good boys go to?"

"To the woods and forests, ma, to gather blackber­ries."

"You naughty fellow!-where do bold boys go to?"

"To Ireland, mamma."

"Well, indeed, I believe it is not a very bad guess. What is your duty to your neighbour?"

"I forget, ma."

"To the Ropers, for example: think, my dear."

"Oh, now I recollect, mamma-to lunch with them."

" Sir, he's a gentleman Desertful of your knowledge; you shall honour Your judgment to entrust him with your favour. His merits will commend it. Men of parts, Fit parts and sound, are rarely to be met with."

Massinger.

THE RED ROVER'S VISIT TO PATERNOSTER-ROW-HIS ESSAYS IN LITERATURE-PROJECT OF LETTERS ON IRELAND-MR. PRIMER'S IDEAS UPON THE SUBJECT-APPETITE FOR PERSONAL OBSERVATION-HOW TO TRAVEL IN IRELAND WITHOUT LEAVING ENGLAND-TREATY BETWEEN AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER.

mr. falcon, accompanied by his daughter Emily, and looking much the better for the retrenchment of his cravat, proceeded, for the fiftieth time in his life, in search of a situation, as nimbly and hopefully as if he were just beginning the world; and the result of the inquiries he made, and the comparisons he instituted, was, that before the expiration of an hour, he had conditionally accepted the post of Secretary to the Irish Branch Society for the Conversion of the Polish Jews; the condition being the consent of his wife to undertake a journey to Ireland, and submit to the many privations and dangers of a residence in that tempestuous part of the empire.

A modern philosopher affirms that mental action travels at the rate of 192,000 miles in a second.*

*Vestiges of Creation.

Whether the operations of Falcon's mind were so rapid, or not, it is certain that he had no sooner taken this provisional step, than his mind conceived a brilliant idea, which he immediately confided to his daughter, by whom it was so warmly encouraged, that he in­stantly called a cab, handed Emily in, jumped in after her, and in ten minutes was closeted with his old friend Primer, the bookseller and publisher in Pater­noster-row. Amongst his other speculations, Mr. Primer was proprietor of a weekly journal, called "The Metropolitan Mercury," to which Mr. Falcon had from time to time contributed "trifles light as air," probably often lighter, on a variety of interesting public ques­tions, such as Wooden Pavements, the Bude Light, Street Music, and the Health of the Parrots and Monkeys in the Zoological Gardens. Mr. Primer had not only a sincere regard for Falcon, but so great an admiration for his talents, that he always invited atten­tion to his articles in a short but conspicuous leader, assuring the public that the observations of "Viator," "Naso," or "Censorinus," were worthy of the most pro­found consideration.

"Mr. Primer, I am thinking of visiting Ireland before very long," said Falcon-literary speculation gleaming in his eye.

"Oh, indeed!" said the small, round, sallow pro­prietor of the "Mercury," rubbing his hands, and fidgeting about his little dark office, to find a chair for Miss Falcon.

"And I'm thinking, Mr. Primer, of publishing my travels. What would you say to a series of letters from Ireland for your weekly journal?"

"Oh! just the very thing we want. Letters from Ireland; and from your lively pen, Mr. Falcon!"

"You think they would do?"

"Do! yes and pay, Mr. Falcon-great demand for books on Ireland, just now. But you must take your time; less than a week won't do; the public wants full details-accurate information-you must see every thing, hear both sides of the question, visit Maynooth and Derrynane Abbey, know Mr. O'Connell, and make your observations on the Repeal of the Union and Young Ireland: in fact a personal narrative, Mr. Falcon-it must be personal."

"Oh! I shall probably remain in Ireland much longer than a week," said Falcon, "for I am about to accept an office in Dublin."

"Oh, indeed!-delighted to hear it, but very sorry to lose you, Mr. Falcon. Does the Honourable Mrs. Falcon go with you, and this young lady?"

Falcon first explained that his wife was not an honourable, in the titular sense of the term; and secondly, that his appointment was not yet definitively settled; but he hoped, if he did go to Ireland, that his wife and daughters would accompany him. "If any thing should happen to break it off-" he con­tinued.

"Oh! in that case, Mr. Falcon," said the bookseller, interrupting him, and suddenly lowering his voice and looking very grave, "I hope you will excuse me. You know how much I prize every thing that comes from you, but unless you actually go to Ireland, and travel in person-really, Mr. Falcon, I cannot under­take-I cannot promise-"

"My dear sir, you don't suppose I dreamed of writing my tour in Ireland without visiting it!"

"Well, now-upon my word-pray excuse me; but I burnt my fingers very lately, Mr. Falcon-upon my word I did-in that very way. Did you see the 'trot through ireland; or, pigs, potatoes, and pacificators,' published last autumn? Well, upon my word, it was very nicely written; we got it up beautifully, it was very handsomely noticed in my 'Mercury,' and the portraits of the pigs and pacificators were reckoned capital likenesses; but it lay on my hands-didn't sell a dozen copies. No reason in the world for it, but that I could not prevail on the author to cross the channel: he dreaded sea-sickness, and his wife was alarmed by the state of the country."

"And how did he manage?" inquired Emily, smiling.

"He visited the Holy Land, Miss."

"The Holy Land!" exclaimed Emily.

"Oh! not the Holy Land in the Bible-the Holy Land in St. Giles's; where the Jews live, and the low Irish; he picked up the manners and customs of the people there, and then he made a tour in Wales to get up the scenery and the geological hobservations. Really, he made a very nice book, considering every thing; only it didn't sell, Mr. Falcon, I assure you. There's a morbid happetite, just now, for personal hobservation."

The conclusion of the conference was a parole agree­ment that Mr. Falcon should furnish the "Mercury" with a series of letters on Ireland for a certain stipu-

lated remuneration; the tour to occupy at least a week, and the engagement to be null and void in case any fatality should prevent the tourist from visiting Ireland at all.

This business having been thus satisfactorily arranged, Mr. Falcon and his fair daughter bade the little yellow-bookseller adieu, and the westering wheels of their cab soon transported them to Charing-cross. There Emily proposed to walk through St. James's park to Pimlico, where the Ropers lived-those "dear Ropers," with whom Mrs. Falcon had affectionately resolved to lunch.

"What are pacificators, papa?" said Emily, as they entered the park.

"Agitators, my love, I am told, whose duty it is to traverse the country with stout olive-branches in their hands, with which they knock people down politely for knocking other people down without ceremony."

"I should think," she observed, "an olive-branch would give a very gentle tap."

"In the hand of a lusty agitator as good a blow, I am told, as a shillelagh," said her father.

"I had no notion the olive grew in Ireland," returned Emily.

"It is not indigenous, I believe," said Falcon, "but I hear it thrives pretty well with cultivation."

"It is a tree I love," said Emily, "but I do not ap­prove of making cudgels of it, and I suspect you do the pacificators a little injustice."

"Young St. Just is coming, more like a student than a senator, not five-and-twenty yet, a youth of slight stature, with mild mellow voice, enthusiast olive complexion, and long black hair."

Carlyle's French Revolution.

"It reads like one of Ossian's heroes, in that mystic and melodious style."

Historic Fancies.

ARCADIA IN TOWN-SCENERY OF LONDON-NURSERY-MAIDS' ARITHMETIC-THE ILLS THAT FOWL IS HEIR TO--THE SUN IN TAURUS-PRANKS OF A ZEPHYR-A CELTIC HERO MAKES HIS FIRST APPEARANCE-IDEA OF POLITICAL REGENERATION -IRELAND IN LABOUR-WHO SHALL BE ACCOUCHEUR?-THE CRUELTY AND GLUTTONY OFTHE SAXONS-BEAUTY AND THE BEAST-THE HERO SEES THE HEROINE.

IT is wonderful how much country may be found in the heart's core of so great a city as London. It would be wrong to assert that the British metropolis is an actual Arcady; yet the fancier of sylvan scenes, if he be not too exacting, may loiter agreeably under the elms of St. James's, or on the margin of the Serpentine. If he expect mountains, he will, of course, be disappointed. Snow-hill bears but a faint resemblance to Mont Blanc; the hill of Holborn is very different from the Jungfrau; and Temple-bar, though a perilous defile enough, gives a most inadequate notion of the Pass of the Simplon. In London we must put up with forest and park scenery; be thankful that amidst so much plebeian underwood we have so many patrician trees, and so 44

fair a sprinkling of little lakes amongst them-little Windermeres and small Killarneys; nor pass unblest the temples of Pan and Sylvanus, represented by the Commissioners of the Woods and Forests.

It is a pleasing contrast to pass suddenly through a dark-red lane, or a gray-stone archway, from the ob­streperous streets, where the ledger is posted in every face, and each man you meet wears an air of vulgar arithmetic, into the open parks, where the only specu­lations are on pretty faces, the only reckonings those of accountant Abigails and controlling Catherines, tott'ing up the fractions of humanity confided to their care, fearful of losing one of their decimal darlings in a thicket, or dropping some small item of the bill of live mortality into the remorseless ornamental waters. To how many strollers and gambollers in the woodland scene that stretches from the gray Horse-Guards to the old ruddy palace of Kensington, do its trees seem forests and its ponds Caspian seas! How many begin and end their acquaintance with groves and pastures within its narrow bounds! It circumscribes for thousands of little metropolitans, all they know, or ever will know, of sheep and sheep-folds, of Flora and the Dryads; the Sylva Sylvarum of the babyhood of Westminster; a duode­cimo book of Nature, for the use of the infantry of London.

But the chief attractions of the parks are the flocks of aquatic birds, beginning with the ladylike and lordly swans, and descending through all the grades of fea­thered dignity, to the smallest of her Majesty's duck-­lings. There existed once upon a time, when royalty

was more rural than it now is, a Master of the Swans amongst the officers of the palace; but that high func­tionary has disappeared from the household, unless the Clerk of the Signet may be counted his modern repre­sentative, under a quolibet, or the Poet Laureate may consider himself, in virtue of his bardic character, the natural guardian of the bird that fades in song.

However, the fowls seem to be safe enough under the protection of her Majesty's little public, by whom they are carefully nourished, in fair weather, with biscuits and gingerbread; unbirdlike diet, of which the swans that drew Juno's coach, or the wild ducks, whose mon­ster meetings on Asiatic lakes are described by Homer, had no conception, and for which they had probably as little taste. Yet the ducks of St. James's evidently love biscuit; and the only risk they seem to run (with no special providence to guard them), is the peril of surfeit and apoplexy, common to them with other featherless bipeds.

It was a bright and blustery day in advanced spring- the sun in the roaring constellation of the Bull. There had been a shower in the forenoon, and the parks were fresh and verdant, even to brilliancy, obviously emu­lating the country out of town, and succeeding marvel­lously well, considering the great discouragement of the smoke that issued as usual from the tops of ten thou­sand chimneys. Little England was present in great force; there was a mob of Marias, a rabble of Rebeccas, Selinas swarmed and Tommies thronged. There per­haps a little bench of bishops, precociously rapacious, were busily amassing the gold hoarded in the cups of

the daisies. There a chancellor in embryo was laying down the law of leap-frog, for a small bar as clamorous as bar need be. There little shrews were practising to become, in the fulness of time, great termagants; and short coquettes threatening to shoot up into full-grown flirts. Young demagogues were taking their first lessons in agitation, and eight-year-old oppressors of junior things were giving their first indications of talents destined perhaps hereafter to misrule colonies and dis­member states.

The scene was innocently tumultuous; boys frolicked, tomboys romped, and the maturer portion of the mul­titude, chiefly of the feminine gender, indemnified themselves for the gravity of their conduct by the vo­lubility of their tongues. The breeze, a pert zephyr, blew perhaps a little fresher than was desirable; for while it crumpled the water, shook the trees, and ruf­fled the painted plumage of the fowls, it also took frolicksome liberties with hats and shawls, blew much beau­tiful hair into many bright eyes, fluttered caps and ribbons without scruple, puffed parasols into the air like parachutes, and occasionally grew so licentious as to inflate a petticoat and turn a silk gown into an air-balloon.

In the midst of this scene, sometimes on the verge of the throng, sometimes in the heart of it, were saun­tering (about the time that Mr. Falcon and his daugh­ter entered the park) two young men, students of law, who had torn themselves for half-an-hour from the captivations of Chitty on Heading, just to compare the intensity of the solar light at St. James's with its bril­liancy in Black-letter-court Middle Temple. The

younger of the two was a remarkable figure. He was tall and slight; his features were handsome and intel­lectual; his cheek was pale, but it was the paleness of study or temperament, not of disease or dissipation, The expression of his eye, which was dark and bright, was something between melancholy and fierceness; but the most striking of his personal peculiarities was the length and profusion of his hair, which hung in thick shining black ringlets over each temple, while at the same time it fell down in equal plenty behind, upon the collar of his coat, where it was crisped backwards, forming a thick continuous circular curl, like a solid groove of ebony, through which with a bodkin you might have passed a ribbon. In short, his hair, both in its redundance and elaborate arrangement, was almost a feminine feature, and the wind seemed to be toying with it under that impression. Although the day was warm, he wore a dark-green cloak, which he folded ambitiously about him, with a palpable attention to effect; and this unseasonable attire heightened the general air of sentimental ferocity by which he was distinguished, and at which perhaps he aimed. Although he was very young, scarcely twenty-three or twenty-four, it was evident that he either was, or considered himself, a personage, with some imposing character to support, or some startling career to run.

His companion was some two or three years his senior, but as florid and mercurial as the other was pale and saturnine. There was nothing very striking about his face or figure; but he had a quick, brilliant, gray eye, which announced not only intellect, but

intellectual vivacity and sunshine. His mouth had the same agreeable and social expression, as if it were made both for letting out good things of one kind, and for letting in good things of another. He was about the middle height, light-haired, dressed with the proper degree of attention to the main points of the toilet, totally free from every symptom of the coxcomb, and we have only to notice a tendency to corpulence, to-complete a picture which was agreeable when observed, though there was nothing about it to attract observation.

"You look particularly revolutionary to-day, Mac Morris," said the elder and livelier of the two young men, to the younger and graver; "pray come to the other side, the wind blows those rebellious locks of yours in my face."

The grave and fierce student complied with this rea­sonable request in silence, and the other continued in the same sprightly tone.

"Come, there is some wilder Celtic speculation than usual in your eye-what is it? You are wishing the Saxons had all but one neck, that you might decapi­tate the English nation at a blow."

"No, Moore," replied Mac Morris, speaking in a measured and solemn tone; "I was thinking of the full force of the expression-the regeneration of a country."

"It means radical reform, does it not?" said Moore; "a general and complete amelioration of customs, laws, and institutions."

"Yes, but it means much more: regeneration signi­fies a new birth. A nation-Ireland, for example-in order to be regenerated must be born again: that is,

she must return to the womb of anarchy, and be born again in the pangs and throes of revolution."

"I trust, then," said Moore, with constrained seri­ousness, "that Ireland will not be regenerated in our day. You propose," he added, turning his lively gray eye upon his companion, with an expression in which humour struggled with solemnity; "you propose, I presume, to officiate as Dr. Locock at the interesting accouchement of which you talk so coolly."

"Accoucheurs will not be wanting, when the hour of labour comes," answered young Mac Morris.

"Have we many months to go?" asked Moore, sedately.

"My belief is," replied the other, "that the night is far spent and the day is at hand."

"With revolution before my eyes, Tierna, I should propose to reverse that expression, and say, the day is far spent, and the night is at hand. What do you pro­pose to call your pretty insurrectionary bantling? What is to be its unchristian name?"

"It will be a republic of some shape or another," answered Mac Morris, not taking notice of the tone of his friend's conversation; "but the precise form of go­vernment is not yet decided."

"I'll tell you the form of it," said Moore, "and give it a name too, although I decline the honour of being its sponsor. Your plans appear to me to combine un-desirableness with impracticability in the highest degree; I therefore propose to call your new government a Utopian Anarchy. And now tell me, who is to be the Anarch? Old Ireland, or Young? O'Connell?"

"Decidedly not!" exclaimed Mac Morris, with energy; "with his senile twaddle about moral force, and the golden link of the crown! Moral humbug! Golden fudge!"

"Tigernach Mac Morris, then? No reply! You have not yet made up your mind to accept the throne of Chaos, and call Orcus and Demogorgon brothers!"

To this Mac Morris made no answer; and for some mo­ments the conversation was suspended, until they came to a spot from which they could observe a group of children amusing themselves with the aquatic birds, and gorging them with biscuit.

"Observe, Moore," said Mac Morris, pointing to a particular case of ornithological gluttony; "observe those little Saxons, with what glee they contemplate the tortures of that ravenous duckling!"

"Yes, Tierna, that duckling must be Irish!"

"Irish! No!-the Saxons don't torture us after that fashion; they reserve the voluptuous pangs of gluttony for themselves. The worst of it is, that it is our beef and pork-"

"To which they owe the pleasures of Indigestion," interrupted Moore. "There is our revenge! The Eng­lish are the most dyspeptic nation in the world, and no country is so free from that complaint as Ireland. However, the Saxon diet, I believe, is getting lighter and lighter every day; so that, in either case you have reason to be satisfied."

"I only wish them the lumper potato for one fort­night."

"It would breed a rebellion, I have no doubt; and,

on the other hand, what a prodigious sensation a sirloin of beef and a plum-pudding would make in Connaught; but, of course, no true Celt would dine upon those characteristically Saxon dishes."

"The Saxons are characteristically and nationally gluttons; the best fed and the worst conditioned race in Europe."

"Well, Tierna, their women are beyond exception."

"I don't think so; I can't admire their women."

"Come, that is pushing your Celtic prejudices a little too far. I thought beauty, like literature, was of no party: Paphos, at least, ought to be neutral ground."

"There is no neutral ground: the Saxon woman is the mother of the Saxon man: besides, there is more beauty, I do not hesitate to affirm, in my own county than in all England, from St. Michael's Mount to Skiddaw."

"Good Tierna, reserve such extravagance for the meridian of Dublin and the Hall of Clamour, where you are so soon to figure. For my part, were I ever so fierce a Celt, I feel that I could almost pardon the Saxons for the sake of their wives and daughters; for­give the Beast on account of the Beauty."

"There goes a specimen!" cried Mac Morris, calling his companion's attention to a lady who just then passed them, with the figure of an Amazon, and the face of a Gorgon."

"Neither a fair specimen, nor a fair lady," replied Moore; "indeed, her features are Celtic; she is pro­bably Scotch, and, consequently your national cousin-german."

"English, beauty has no spell for me; you may play Hercules to a Saxon Omphale, if you are disposed."

"Do you remember the woman we saw at the opera, last Saturday night?"

"She was Irish, I am positive."

"Every thing Irish is beautiful, and every thing beautiful is Irish-a pretty little Celtic circle to argue in! Here comes something intensely Irish, then; Celt or Saxon, I think you will admit this is handsome; the lady coming towards us in white, leaning on that odd-looking man with a nose like a red-hot reaping-hook."

Mac Morris made no reply, but he was evidently struck by the beauty of Emily Falcon, the effect of which was heightened by the extreme yet elegant sim­plicity of her dress, which displayed her figure to the best advantage, while the wind freshened her cheek, and threw her luxuriant yellow hair into charming dis­order.

Miss Falcon and her father were forcibly struck at the same time by the singularity of the Celtic student's physiognomy, attire, and deportment.

"There is a hero for you, Emily," said Falcon, when the young men had passed them.

Emily smiled, and observed that the wild figure re­minded her of Mr. Carlyle's description of St. Just, the French revolutionary leader. "Do you recollect your New Zealand chief, Emily?" "Now, papa, how can you be so malicious? you know he was a Persian," she replied, laughing. "Have you got the ring he gave you?"

Emily answered the question by pulling the glove off her left hand, and showing upon the middle finger a turquoise of uncommon size and beauty, which the Oriental grandee had placed there with his own august hands at a fete-champetre some years before, where Miss Falcon had been formally presented to him, after singing a popular Italian air in a style which he had not heard equalled in the gardens of Gul or the mea­dows of Cashmere.

"Emily, my romantic girl, your mother and I were afraid, I assure you, that you had a mind to be Lady Hassan Khan; I had hopes of being made a vizier, or at least a mufti; but we shall be late at Mrs. Roper's."

"Come Tierna," said Moore, as his associate con­tinued to gaze upon the receding form of the fair Emily, "depend upon it she is Saxon; you must not leave your heart behind you in England; I have no faith in Celtic prejudices when they come in contact with sterling English worth or loveliness. Come, I must restore you heart-whole to your friends, the re­pealers."

"My friends, the repealers!" exclaimed Mac Morris. "I am no repealer."

"You!-no repealer!"

"I go much further than that, I assure you. Ireland was once a nest of kingdoms, and my principle is to restore them all. Dominick!-mark what I now say!-the age of unions is past!"

"Lucullus.-Alas, good lord! a noble gentleman 'tis, if he would not keep so good a house. Many a time and oft I have dined with him and told him on't; and come again to supper to him, of purpose to have him spend less; and yet he would embrace no counsel, take no warning by my coming. Every man has his fault, and liberality is his; I have told him on't, but I could never get him from it."

Timon of Athens.

THE BOMPASES-THEIR FAMILY HOTEL-THEIR COUSINS-THE MAN WITHOUT A COUSIN-DINERS OUT NORTH AND SOUTH OF OXFORD-STREET--MR. BOMPAS PROPOSES TO BURN HIS HOUSE-WHY THE ROPERS TOOK THE MEASLES-HOW MISS PAULINA FALCON LEARNED TO SING-SECOND SOLILOQUY OF MR. DICK CHATWORTH-DARING PROPOSITION OF MR. BOMPAS-MRS. BOMPAS IN TRIBULATION-A MAGISTRATE CALLED IN--FURNITURE OF THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.

the Bompases of Bryanston-square, upon whom the gipsy's little stray daughter Paulina had now been quartered for several months, were an opulent family who kept a plentiful table, a comfortable coach, nu­merous, fat servants, and (unhappily for themselves) several spare bed-rooms. Their house was one of those expensive establishments where a thousand pounds a year might have been saved by the mere inspection of bills, and the commonest precautions against domestic peculation. But Mr. Bompas (a retired merchant and an ex-senator), was content with keeping within his ample income; he left a large margin for extortions and superfluities, proceeding on the principle that he could

afford to be cheated, and that what he lost in revenue he gained in repose. He was a serene, social, dinner-giving, tooth-picking gentleman, with liberal good-natured opinions upon all subjects, an indolent vein of pleasantry, perfect digestive organs, a capital cellar which he visited daily, and a handsome library, where he studied remissly, but occasionally slept with atten­tion. Mrs. Bompas was a still nearer approach to that immoveable serenity, in which the Quietists supposed the perfection of human nature to consist. She was a preposterously amiable, and incorrigibly good-tempered lady, who never harboured a suspicion, refused a re­quest, or resisted an aggression, in her life. It might be said of her what Massinger says of a like character.

"The plethory of goodness is thy ill. Thy virtues vices."

In fact between the easy husband and the easy wife, the Bompases might as well have lived without clasps to their purses, or hinges to their hall-door. Their house was a general rendezvous for marauders and intruders of all sorts and sexes, social nuisances of every description, and country-cousins of all degrees of real or pretended consanguinity. This was so well understood that people would talk of going to Bompas's as they would of going to Thomas's or the Blen­heim; but it was much easier to keep their house full of dull and disagreeable interlopers than to make it the resort of good company; in fact, the latter shunned as much as the former infested it; the bores and monstrosities of every kind who swarmed round the Bompases thick as wasps round a jar of honey, left no

room: for respectable society, or scared it away by the terror of their names and reputations.

"The Bompases have asked us to dine-shall we go?"

"The Bompases! no!"-with a shudder-"they are very well themselves, but they have such strange people always with them."

"True, we should have the Kickshaws, or the Wad-diloves."

"Or the Kettlewells and Falcons."

"Oh! those Falcons-only look at Mrs. Falcon, and she construes it into an invitation to dinner. Send an apology this instant-not a question about it."

This is a sample of the kind of dialogue that often took place amongst the friends of this excellent family, who were forever wondering how it happened that so many people refused to come to them, and yet their table was always full.

Still Mr. Bompas was continually attempting dinners, and discovering pretexts for giving them, as if there was nothing he understood so well, or achieved so suc­cessfully; he was particularly ambitious of receiving authors, travellers, professors, Polish counts, Italian re­fugees, and miscellaneous moustaches of all nations. When they accepted his hospitalities (which they ge­nerally did) he was greatly flattered; and when they did not (a rare occurrence) it was still highly gratify­ing to have to say, "I expected Count Sneezinskoff;" or, I asked "Mr. Pritchard, from Tahiti;" or, "I was in hopes of having Captain Warner to meet you."

This Boniface of Bryanston-square was sauntering

down Oxford-street, on hospitable thoughts intent, musing on turbots, and devising means for catching an oriental tourist, when he suddenly met Mr. Dick Chatworth (with whom the reader has a slight acquaint­ance), and he was delighted with the opportunity of asking the brisk loquacious bachelor to make one of the contemplated party.

Mr. Chatworth was a professional diner-out in his secondary or tertiary sphere; and diners-out north of Oxford-street are fully as respectable as diners-out south of that important boundary, although they write no articles in the reviews to bait their dinner-hooks, and have no anecdotes to relate of dear duchesses who treat them behind their backs as literary parasites de­serve to be treated. Chatworth, like all his tribe, had his little budget always well filled with small talk for the parlour, and still minuter chat, mingled now and then with a dainty bit of scandal, for the drawing-room. He had a number of anti-narcotic talents, by the exercise of which he kept people from falling asleep before the second course; a prattling, rattling, tattling little fellow, who officiated as Fame's deputy-trumpeter in Marylebone society, where he seemed to possess the at­tribute of omnipresence. He was now tripping along in his meridian splendour, covered with chains, rings, pins, brooches, and studs enough to establish a jeweller's shop, recounting his dinner-invitations, and coining an Issue of light jokes to repay a round of solid hospi­talities.

"Dine with us to-morrow at six?" said the dinner-giver.

"With the greatest pleasure," said the dinner-eater.

"House full at present?-Capital family hotel!" he added, with the laughing freedom of an old acquain­tance.

"No, not full just now; the Humblebees left us yesterday; nobody with us, I think, but one of the Miss Falcons." "Falcon!"

"Distant relations of my wife: odd people, birds of passage: 'faith, Chatworth, I believe we have more cousins than any family in England."

"If the Falcons were not your cousins, I should say they were rather birds of prey than birds of passage."

"I quite agree with you; don't spare them for my sake-you bachelors know nothing of the plagues that we married men are subject to."

"One of them is keeping a house for the use of your cousins. The Falcons are the most domestic people I know-in other people's houses."

"I have no notion where the old birds are at present."

"Why, they are at my sister's in Harley-street; came to town yesterday."

"Devilish sorry to hear it-I thought the Freemans had left town."

"So they have, for Plymouth, and the Falcons have seized on the vacant nest. Falcons, you know, are like cuckoos; they don't build for themselves-Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves."

"Chatworth, I'll burn my house," said Bompas, puffing his florid cheeks, energetically buttoning his

blue coat, and feigning an exasperation he never felt in his life.

"No, you won't; you only keep it for the accommo­dation of your friends."

"Well, I won't burn my house, but I promised Mrs. Bompas a trip to the Rhine; I'll start the day after to-morrow."

"Can't you do what the Ropers do?-they muffle their knocker enormously, and give out that they have got the scarletina, or whatever may be the going com­plaint of the season. I called this morning, and found them all in the measles, expecting the Falcons to luncheon. They will pounce upon you next, depend upon it: somewhere about six o'clock-eh, mine host of the Bompas Arms?"

" 'Faith, I often tell Mrs. Bompas that we might as well keep a table-d'hote; but the Falcons are deuced clever. I have got a music-master for my daughters, but you would swear he was paid only to teach Pau­lina Falcon; she contrives to get his lessons all to herself."

"You not only board and lodge your cousins, but you educate them into the bargain; Bompas, you are the best family man I ever heard of. Well, I bless my stars, I have not a live cousin in the world."

"Happy man!"

"You'll take Miss Paulina Falcon to the Rhine with you."

"No, no, I won't."

"I prophecy you will; finish her education with a continental tour, and then provide her with a good

husband, before you get one of your own daughters off your hands."

"Well, Chatworth, remember to-morrow, six sharp; you'll meet the author of 'A Day in Jericho." And the becousined Bompas went his way, not actu­ally sorrowing, but provoked to think that his wife's piratical relations were within a few minutes' cruise of Bryanston-square.

Chatworth pursued his course, ruminating on cousins, and congratulating himself on his cousinless estate. Cousin, in French, he reflected, means a gnat, or mosquito; why should there not be cousin-screens as well as mosquito curtains? How fearfully cousin-bitten poor Bompas is! Why the deuce do people keep open houses and spare bed-rooms?

"I asked Chatworth to dine to-morrow," said Mr. Bompas, to his tranquil wife, when he returned home, "and I'm thinking of asking the author of 'A Day in Jericho,' and my brother's pupils."

Mr. Bompas's brother, Charles Bompas, was an eminent lawyer of the Middle Temple, who initiated young men into the mysteries of pleading, while he largely practised himself that divine art. "Who are they?" asked Mrs. Bompas, the picture of peace and plenty in bombazine.

"Two young Irishmen, my dear."

"Two Irishmen!" exclaimed the lady thus affec­tionately addressed, moved as much as it was pos­sible to move so inert a mass, for nothing ruffled that did not frighten her. "Two Irishmen! what shall we do?-what will become of us?"

"We shall do very well, my dear, don't excite yourself."

"But you know I'm so nervous-the bare idea of a riot-"

"Riot, my dear!" said Bompas, laughing, "there will be no riot, believe me."

"How can you say so? There always is-"

"Never in private society."

"And who, my dear, do you intend to ask to meet them? Nobody will venture."

"Why," replied Bompas, amused at his wife's ter­rors, "perhaps I may pick up a couple of Ioway Indians,-if not, I'll ask the Green Man without his still, and a few nice people from St. Giles's."

"Now, indeed, Mr. Bompas, it's no laughing mat­ter to ask two Irishmen to dinner; will you promise me to ask Mr. Daniel, the magistrate?"

"Very well, my love, that's settled."

"But, how shall I ever have enough of potatoes! Indeed, Mr. Bompas, it was very rash."

"Recollect the potatoes must come up in their jackets; otherwise-remember-I won't answer for the peace."

"I positively won't let the girls dine with us, to catch the Irish brogue. Oh, dear, dear!"

"Well, they must have a peep at the wild Irishmen over the bannisters. I stipulate for that. Lydia is improving in her singing."

The audible efforts of a fair vocalist in an adjoin­ing apartment occasioned the observation.

"That's Paulina Falcon, my dear, with the music-master."

"Oh, by the by, my dear, the Falcons are all in town, at Freeman's in Harley-street."

"Dear me! just think! and their own daughter not to know any thing about it!"

"Probably they have just as little idea where she is; at all events don't say a word to little Paulina until after our dinner to-morrow; this house is actually an hotel."

"What can I do, my dear?"

"What can I do?"

"I do not understand how other families manage. They must actually turn people out. I'm sure if I was to turn any people out, it ought to be the Falcons; only, indeed, Mrs. Falcon speaks French so beautifully, and is so useful to the girls. Besides, they are such friends of the Freemans.

"Well, I'll go to my brother's chambers."

"And don't forget Mr. Daniel, the magistrate."

"Never fear, and I'll bid him put the riot-act in his pocket."

"Now don't forget;" and good Mrs. Bompas, ex­hausted by a degree of excitement very unusual to her, sank into the drowsiest of all imaginable arm­chairs, billowing with fat cushions, in which guilt itself would have dropped asleep in five minutes. That chair, like most of the furniture in the house, seemed to have been, bought at an auction of the effects of the Castle of Indolence. The matron remained immersed in the

waves of down, alternately dozing and repeating to her­self, "This house is actually an hotel," until the next peal of the knocker announced a new arrival of social pirates, or a batch of relations from the country. Well might Mrs. Falcon say that Bompas's was "the most convenient house in London." But woe to you gen­tlemen and ladies who keep convenient houses! "It would appear;" says the writer on bird-architecture, already quoted, "that in proportion to the convenience of a nest, and the comforts it affords, it is the more liable to be seized upon by those birds who are fond of shelter, but dislike the trouble of procuring it by their own labour."

"My boyish ear still clung to hear Of Erin's pride of yore, Ere Saxon foot had dared pollute Her independent shore. Of chiefs long dead who rose to head Some gallant patriot few, Till all my aim on earth became To strike one blow for you, Dear land- To strike one blow for you." Song of Young Ireland: "Spirit of the Nation" mr. charles bompas's chambers in the temple-irish students at business-descent of mac morris from a shakspearian hero-shakspeare's dishonesty with respect to jack cade- irish hobbies-bucephalus-moore's count for the ice- superiority of the brehon law to the english-irish mists and optical illusions-a novel in law-calf-celtic and saxon hospitality-sudden explosion of the latter-tiger-nach's notion of a london dinner.

the Irish pupils of Mr. Charles Bompas have already been seen sauntering, and heard discoursing in St. James's Park. On the succeeding day, the two students, Mr. Tigernach Mac Morris and Mr. Dominick Moore, might have been found seated, one upon each side of a tall, black, worm-eaten desk, in a chamber not much more luminous than a coal-hole, prosecuting their legal studies, drafting declarations, drawing pleas, and set­tling surrebutters. Tigernach's hair was giving him considerable embarrassment, tumbling down over his

eyes, and occasionally dabbling in the spacious ink-bottle before him, and then sprinkling the paper with the spray of the black sea.

"A liberal occupation this," said Tigernach. " What may your task be this morning, Counsellor Moore?"

"Morning! I thought it midnight. But what am I doing? Declaring in debt against the son of a British peer for a thousand pounds and upwards, due to a tavern-keeper at Oxford for an incredible quantity of turtle, venison, Champagne, claret, fruit, and such lots of ice that I think I must throw in a count for an iceberg. What are you doing? Either in Battery or in Debt, I presume, considering that you come from Connaught."

"Mine is a turtle case, too," replied Mac Morris, with a vivacity unusual to him. "Breach of promise- the old thing-Dove v. Fantail-bill and cross-bill. Fantail plighted his troth to Dove, under the impres­sion that she was as rich as she was fair. He subse­quently found that her face was her fortune-"

"And he broke it."

"Of course he did. You can only hit the sordid Saxon heart with a shaft of gold."

" 'Cupid's best arrow with the golden head,' says Shakspeare."

"A sentiment worthy of a Saxon poet."

"Come, Mac Morris, it is not for you to run down Shakspeare. I presume you are descended from the Captain MacMorris immortalised in the play of 'Henry the Fifth,' as 'a very valiant gentleman,' intrusted by the Duke of Gloster with the direction of the siege of Harfleur."

"I am; but Irish heroism wants no Saxon rhymer to glorify it. However, is it not strange that my an­cestor should be the only Irishman in all the plays of Shakspeare?"

"Pardon me, there is another. Have you forgotten the celebrated demagogue, Mr. John Cade?"

"True, Cade was Irish; but Shakspeare represents him as a Kentishman. I wonder he didn't filch my ancestor, too, and assert that the great Mac Morris was born at Limehouse or Wapping."

"How did it happen that your forefather was only a captain?"

"More of Shakspeare's disparagements!* My ances­tor commanded in chief the Irish brigade that accom­panied Henry V. to France-at the head of our cavalry"-

"Pony-ry is the better word; for if I recollect well the Norman chronicler, Monstrelet, says that the Irish rode adroitly their little mountain horses."

"Yes, it was a small breed, but no such war-horses were ever seen on French ground since."

"Do you know what they were anciently called?"

"No."

"Hobbies. The hobby-horse is Irish. Your ancestor rode a hobby in the times of the Plantagenets, and the race seems not to have degenerated, for you ride a superb one yourself at the present day. Your Repeal is the very Bucephalus of Hobbies."

* Captain, however, was a title of great dignity in old Ireland. An Act of Queen Elizabeth abolished captainships, with a long train of exactions and impositions connected with those anarchic jurisdic­tions.

"False pleasantry, Dominick!-that hobby will ride the Saxon down before many moons go round. The moment I return to Dublin I shall leap on its back, undaunted by your sneers; and since you call it Bucephalus, I suppose I may accept the omen, and consider myself Alexander."

"The Repeal hobby carries better in Ireland than it does here," replied Moore; "so I think you are wise to reserve your wild ride for the other side of the channel."

Dominick might have quoted Moryson in support of this last remark. "The said hobbies," says Moryson, "being bred in the soft ground of Ireland, are soon lamed when they are brought into England."

Perhaps it was some fiction of law that suggested the change of the conversation; but the next time the young pleaders relaxed from their dry toil, poetry was the topic of discussion.

"How do you account," asked Moore, "for the scarcity of Irish poetry? I suppose there is a Celtic explanation of it;-it was not for want of bards, cer­tainly, for there was an immense corporation of them."

"Recollect, the bards were judges, lawgivers, and historians, as well as poets. If you were Lord Chan­cellor of England, First Lord of the Treasury, and Dr. Lingard, all at the same time, your leisure for rhyming would be meagre. Besides, the chroniclers tell us that the destruction of Irish manuscripts by the Saxon barbarians was prodigious; many were torn up by English tailors for their measures."

"I observe," said Moore, "that Moses, the tailor of

the Minories, has established himself in Dublin; probably commissioned by the government to com­plete the havoc of our literary remains."

"Very probably," said Mac Morris, gravely.

"Well," said Moore, "there is no dearth of modern Irish poetry, at all events. Poetica surgit tempestas, as Juvenal has it;-it blows a heavy gale of song just at present. Poetry and politics seem in Ireland to be con­vertible terms. Your poets are politicians, and your politicians poets."

"So it is, and so it ought to be," said the other, "it is the politician's business to realize the poet's dreams. Poetry is but the theory of politics."

"Now for a count," cried Dominick, returning to his labours, without vouchsafing more than a smile in answer to his friend's last observations, "for all the Ice in Nova-Zembla; and Heaven knows it would hardly have been too much to cool all the French wine which this tufted Oxonian seems to have guzzled at the ex­pense of the simpleton who trusted him."

"Dominick, I ask you," said Mac Morris, throwing down his pen fiercely, "is this a pursuit for intellec­tual men?-above all, for men with our Past and our Future?"

"Mounting your hobby?" said Moore, without in­termitting his labours, or raising his eyes from the paper.

"Yes," continued Mac Morris, growing more vehe­ment, jumping down from his stool, and tossing his hair wildly about his temples; "yes, my spirit revolts from this pedantic drudgery. But term will soon be

over, and with it the term of my captivity. I enroll myself in the Young Ireland Club-I throw myself into the Hall of Clamour-"

"Good Tierna, keep your clamour until you go to Dublin. Shall I read you my count for the ice- 'Ten thousand icebergs, ten thousand icicles, ten thousand water-ices, ten thousand cream-ices-to wit, three thousand peach, three thousand pine-apple, &c. &c., by him, the said Gorges Merivale, commonly called the Honourable Gorges Merivale, eaten, drunk, swallowed, imbibed, devoured, and absorbed, in man­ner and form aforesaid, at Oxford aforesaid, in the year of our Lord, and so forth'-copy me that into your book of precedents."

"Collar of Moran! why don't we revive our own incomparable Brehon Law-the most perfect system of jurisprudence that human wit or divine wisdom ever produced? Here are we, Dominick, pent up in this dingy, sunless hole, studying the laws that have enslaved, and the statutes that have ground us to the dust."

"Mr. Bompas's chambers certainly want no Venetian blinds:-I firmly believe that the tenants of this court have about as much ocular acquaintance with the Georgium Sidus as they have with the planet Sol; but, benighted as we are, Mac Morris, I find much that is excellent in the laws you abuse, and a decided im­provement in the spirit and temper of modern legisla­tion."

"You are lynx-eyed."

"No; but my vision is less obscured than yours by the lamentable prejudices of race. You see English

objects only through the mists of your native moun­tains, and our Irish vapours have not the property of illuminating the landscape, or affording the most im­partial view of its details; you may have remarked that, in your roamings through Connemara. God knows that England has sufficiently sinned against us, esti­mating her conduct by the strictest rides of historic truth. Did you see my Tidd?"

"Dominick, would you were a better Celt!"

"I am neither Celt nor Saxon, but a law-student and British citizen of the name of Moore, and I beg to ask you have you eaten my Tidd?"

"There it is, on that lame hunchbacked chair yonder."

"What's this? 'Sybil!'-a novel in Charles Bompas's chambers!"

"Oh, it's mine. Charles Bompas is guiltless of having ever read a work of fancy in his life, except 'Redgauntlet,' for the sake of the case of Peebles versus Plainstanes. Look at it on the third shelf, bound in law-calf, beside Selwyn's 'Nisi Prius.'

"A very proper place for a work of fiction," said Moore. "The count in a declaration comes from the French conte, a tale. I have just produced a tale of an iceberg, and a very romantic one it is."

"There was now a pause for some minutes. Mac Morris pored over the Young England manifesto; and the pleading at which Moore was engaged, advanced with the most admired prolixity, exhausting sweet­meats and running out all the wines.

"The Celt is more hospitable than the Saxon, cer-

tainly," resumed the mercurial Moore, his thoughts being disposed by his present employment to run in a gastronomic channel. "I have been six or seven months in this opulent and luxurious capital, and I have never been served with a writ of invitation to dinner."

"They have all the vices of civilisation without any of the virtues of barbarism," said Mac Morris; "how well the words inhospita tecta tyranni, apply to the houses of the Saxon churls!"

"There is one thing which, on reflection, I must say for them," said Moore; "illustrious law-students as we are, not a family in London knows of our existence. As to Charles Bompas, our worthy master, he is not an entertaining man in any sense of the word-but some­body knocks."

"Another victim of Saxon perfidy, or some patri­cian swindler who wants to pay his tradesman's bills with a special demurrer."

Mac Morris opened the door and admitted Mr. Bompas of Bryanston-square, with whom both the students had a slight acquaintance.

He electrified them by the proposition which he came to make. "Plain dinner in the quiet way- nobody but a distinguished oriental traveller-make Mrs. Bompas appy-begged them to let his bro­ther know he would expect him-half-past six sharp- wind in the south-west-funds steady-a nice country is Hireland-law fine profession-great prizes-very laborious-good morning."

"The deuce, Dominick, what possessed you to ac­cept?" cried Mac Morris, the moment Mr. Bompas dis­appeared.

"Could I refuse to make Mrs. Bompas 'appy?" replied Moore:-"there's something in the wind, though, depend upon it. War with France, perhaps- the policy of conciliation! You heard the compliment to Hireland?"

"Barbarous race!-incapable of speaking their own paltry language!-Make his wife 'appy-I wonder he didn't say his lady. There's one of our lords and mas­ters for you!-By St. Patrick's staff, and St. Bridget's slipper, I'll not dine with him!"

"Oh, come, it's a compact;-were we to recede it would be said we kept no faith with heretics. It would be a set off for the Treaty of Limerick."

"A plain dinner in the quiet way! think of that, Dominick!-The invariable dinner in the house of a London merchant, is a round of beef and a couple of plum-puddings."

"Alarming, no doubt; but I am always curious to observe the manners and customs of foreign nations, so that with courage for our crest, and philosophy and religion for our supporters, I don't consider the case desperate. At the same time, this sudden burst of hos­pitality is singular. If we could see the sky from Bom-pas's windows, I have no doubt we should discern a small black cloud in the west." "I suppose we are in for it." "We are-shall we have a walk in the parks to

invigorate our nerves and whet our appetites? The clerk can throw in the money counts. 'To-morrow! God save the Queen!'"

And the light-hearted Dominick Moore jumped from his perch, twitched his hat from the peg where it hung, and followed by his fiercer and sedater associate, emerged from the eternal dusk of Mr. Charles Bom-pas's chambers into the everlasting twilight of the small smoked quadrangle, where that indefatigable lawyer had plodded and pleaded for thirty years, indulging himself with but one rural excursion in the interval, which was a trip to Scotland, not to admire the Highland scenery, but to visit the locality of the celebrated Auchterarder case.

"Brutus.-I know my hour is come. Vohmnius.-Not so, my lord."

Julius Caesar.

PUNCTUALITY THROWN AWAY-SIXES AND SEVENS--ORIENTAL TRA­VELLERS--REMOVAL OF DOCTORS' COMMONS-MOORE ALARMS THE LADIES-NOTE FROM AN EASTERN TOURIST-AGREEABLE WAYS OF DOROTHY BOMPAS-THE OBJECTIONABLE OLD GENTLEMAN-ICED SOUP AND FROZEN FISH-MOORE UPON WINE AND WATER-AN UNEXPECTED VISITATION.

mr. chatworth was the first arrival at Bryanston-square. As he was the pink of punctuality, he stood under the balcony of Mr. Bompas's drawing-room pre­cisely as his minute French watch, not much bigger than a wafer, pointed with its little finger to six o'clock.

There is no virtue more commonly thrown away than punctuality. It was only Chatworth's glittering even­ing-dress that prevented the servants from taking him for a morning visiter. A fellow in blue and crimson reconnoitred him sceptically; and an impudent page, studded with gold buttons, like a door with brass nails, seemed disposed to ask him had he come to breakfast. The clock in the hall pointed to half-past six, which made the page's impertinence more provoking. The hall was strewn with portmanteaus, great-coats, bags, and umbrellas, like the office of the White Horse

Cellar. "The effects of my cousins," thought Chatworth. He proceeded up stairs; and from the base of the second flight observed a rush of petticoats from the drawing-room, with sundry feminine flutterings, girlish titterings, and the rustle of many muslins. Of course there was nobody to receive him. Mr. Bompas was standing at that moment in Trafalgar-square, leisurely waiting for a Baker-street omnibus; and Mrs. Bompas had made up her mind not to appear until the magistrate was present to keep young Ireland in order. There was nothing for him but to revise his toilet in each looking-glass successively; smell each particular geranium and pelargonium, heliotrope and balsam; then travel through Brockedon's Passes of the Alps; next review all the plain faces in a soi-disant Book of Beauty; and, finally, compare the stories told by three pompous time-pieces with sentimental designs, that ticked in different parts of the room. Cupid and Psyche averred it was seven; Aurora and Tithonus vowed it was near eight; Time handing Truth out of a well, solemnly protested with the point of his golden scythe, that it was past midnight.

Chatworth was just marvelling what tale the clock in the kitchen was telling, when Mr. Dominick Moore was announced, unaccompanied by his friend Mac Morris.

"The author of 'A Day In Jericho,' " said Chatworth to himself, surveying Moore.

"The distinguished oriental traveller," thought Moore, paying the same attention to Chatworth, and confirmed

in his opinion by all the "barbaric pearl and gold" with which the spruce bachelor had decorated his person.

The young Irishman then did precisely the same thing that Chatworth had done; he took the tour of the chronometers, observed audibly-"conflicting tes­timony"-and then looked at his own watch. Chat-worth, on the other hand, found himself reduced to some stuffed humming-birds, in a glass case, which painfully reminded him of other stuffed birds which he would have had greater pleasure just then in criticising, for he was nothing of an ornithologist as long as fowl re­tained their plumage.

"If I don't speak to the Englishman he will never speak to me;" said Moore to himself, and advancing to Chatworth, he hazarded a remark on the hours of eating in the Ottoman empire.

"Did you find them convenient?" asked Chatworth.

"I!"-exclaimed Moore-"I was never further east than the Tower;-but you, I believe-"

"I have travelled further east than you," said Chat-worth, "for I have been at the Tunnel."

"Singular," said Moore laughing, "that we should take one another for oriental tourists, when we are, probably, the only two men in London who have not lounged in the Lebanon, and been bitten by the fleas of Jericho. I was positive that rose in your button-hole was the rose of Sharon."

"Ha, ha," laughed Chatworth,-"I took you for the 'Crescent and the Cross.' "

"And I you for the 'Tiara and the Turban.' "

"Palestine is now the regular lawyer's trip in the long vacation; the caravanseries are become inns of court."

"And Doctors' Commons," said Moore, "is removed to Old Jewry."

"I fear our host has gone crusading with the rest; I was asked for sharp six."

"And I for half-past six, with an acute accent."

"And I for a special seven, and here I am to the minute," said Charles Bompas, the pleader; who had entered the room unperceived, and now joined them, with his watch in his hand.

In a quarter of an hour the Amphitryon made his appearance; another pregnant quarter brought forth Mrs. Bompas, looking exhausted and terrified, as if she gazed on air-drawn shillelaghs, and fancied herself in the heart of Tipperary; and finally came rolling in two great globular Misses Bompas, accompanied by little Paulina Falcon (who looked like a cherry between two melons), all in considerable trepidation, likewise evi­dently caused by Mr. Dominick Moore, who never put his hand in his pocket, but the fair part of the com­pany thought he would pull out a pike, or produce a brace of pistols.

Moore apologised for his friend Mac Morris, who, he said, had been suddenly obliged to leave town for Salis­bury on urgent business, and had requested him to pre­sent Mr. and Mrs. Bompas with his regrets and excuses. In the course of a few minutes, two more apologies were received; one from Mr. Daniel, the magistrate, the other from the author of "A Day in Jericho," written on pa­pyrus, and excusing himself on the ground that he was en-

gaged to a pipe and pilaw party, at the Oriental Club, with forty or fifty authors of eastern trips and travels.

Mr. Bompas displayed this literary curiosity to his guests, and then rang the bell and ordered dinner.

"My dear," exclaimed Mrs. Bompas, "I asked old Mr. Copplestone."

"He asked himself, mamma," said the eldest Miss Bompas, Dorothy by name, an immense fat, white girl, who went swinging about the room like a pet porpoise, kissing her father, mother, uncle, sister, Paulina Falcon, and every thing kissable, except Dominick Moore and Mr. Chatworth, who sometimes thought she would end with kissing them too. Dorothy, however, was a clever girl, acquainted with three "onomys," two "ologies," and an "ism."

"But we never wait for any of the Copplestones," said Bompas.

"No, to be sure, my dear; but I said we dined at seven, and it's only half-past seven now."

"Half-hours count for nothing in this house," thought Chatworth.

"Eight, mamma," said Dorothy, appealing to Cupid and Psyche, and kissing the former through the force of habit.

Dinner, however, was ordered, and before it was announced Mr. Copplestone hobbled in; a most unat­tractive and objectionable old gentleman, seemingly afflicted with a complication of all the maladies that make people charming in the eyes of doctors and apo­thecaries, but proportionally disagreeable to the rest of the world. He was asthmatic, rheumatic, phlegmatic,

apoplectic, cataleptic, and dyspeptic, very lame, very deaf, and very blind. As he limped down stairs, he pulled out a box of pills, and politely asked Moore, would he like a "Cockle?"

"Thank you," said Moore, "I would prefer an oyster just at the present moment;" and the fat Doro thy, who had fallen to him in the lottery of ladies, gracefully giggled, and began to wonder what people found so alarming in a wild Irishman.

The dinner, which had been hot at half-past six, was as cold at eight as a picnic in Nova Zembla. It was not the cook's fault, nor that of Cupid and Psyche; there was nothing to blame but the system of the Bompases, who seemed, nevertheless, to fancy that it was their particular talent and vocation to give dinners. Burgess, Ude, and Grignon-all the ability of the Trois Freres-the genius of the Rochers de Cancales-the science of the Cafe de Paris-could have done nothing in, a house where chronology and arithmetic were so contemptuously treated; where every guest had a separate hour; and the number of the company, up to the latest moment, was an indeterminate problem.

The soup suggested frozen images, and the conver­sation turned upon ices and iced things.

Chatworth protested, when the fish came, that salmon was only worth eating in the Polar Seas, and told a story of Captain Parry, and an anecdote of a walrus.

"Mr. Moore, take a glass of Champagne with me," cried Bompas, driven from the cuisine, and wisely falling back on the cellar.

"With pleasure," said Moore, praying that the wine might prove as cool as the soup.

"You are not a teetotaller, though I believe Mac Morris is," said the lawyer to his pupil.

"In the cause of Matthew versus Bacchus," replied Moore, "Mac Morris is for the plaintiff, and I'm for the defendant. Mac Morris is a debauchee in cold water; goes to Donnybrook Fair for the sake of the brook itself. For my part, I could dispense with water alto­gether; managing to shave with mulled hock. The Rhine and Rhone are charming rivers; but I prefer their wines to their waters."

"But you approve of temperance, sir, I hope," said the timorous Mrs. Bompas, alarmed by Moore's strain, and recollecting all the tales she had ever heard of fighting and frolic.

"I do," said Moore, "when temperance keeps itself sober; but I confess I don't go with the stream that is running just now. Mrs. Bompas, may I have the honour of taking wine with you?-will you take Cham­pagne?"

As this was said in a gay, social, quiet way, it began to dispel good Mrs. Bompas's fears of an Irish row; but a storm was gathering in another point of the compass. She had scarcely raised the sparkling glass to her lips, when a thundering knock shook the house, and made the plate ring on the sideboard. Even deaf old Mr. Copplestone distinctly heard it.

"What unseasonable hours people take for visiting!" ejaculated Mrs. Bompas nervously, almost dropping the glass from her hands.

81

"Probably my good woman and the boys," said Mr. Copplestone; and a shudder ran through the company, at the idea of the wife and children of such a very objec­tionable father.

"Whoever they are, they are executing their habere and taking possession," said Bompas, the lawyer; and in a moment the door was thrown open, and a servant announced-

"Mr. and Mrs. Falcon, the Misses Falcon, and Master Falcon."

Moore was amazed; but Chatworth, who took the delight of a naturalist in studying the habits of rare birds of the parasitical species, forgot the cold soup in the excess of his satisfaction.

"You must double your guard, my lord, for, on my knowledge, There are some so sharp-set as not to be kept out By a file of musketeers; and 'tis less dangerous, I'll undertake, to stand at push of pike, With cannon playing on us, than to stop One harpy, your perpetual guest, from entrance."

Massinger.

ADVICE TO HARPIES-THE GIPSY'S DOCTRINE OF HOSPITALITY- HOME, SWEET HOME-ANECDOTE OF VOLTAIRE-MRS. FALCON DIS­COVERS AN ISLAND-HER POOR PETS-ADDITIONAL TOUCHES OF THE FAIR EMILY-IRISH NAMES AND NICKNAMES-THE POLITICAL PICTURESQUE-GALLOW-GLASSES AND WOOD-KERNS-MRS. FALCON IS GRATIFIED BY MOORE'S ACCOUNT OF IRELAND.

"Now, dear Mrs. Bompas," cried the gipsy, "are we not the most impudent people in the world? Now do confess we are. This is all my doing, I assure you. Falcon wanted to dine at home; but I could not think of being two days in town without coming to this dear house; the dear Bompases, as we always call you. Then I proposed to dine with you in the family way- enceinte, as the French say." This unintentional pic­ture of the speaker's actual situation produced an effect on the company that may be imagined. "The chil­dren were delighted; they are always so happy here; I often say they prefer it to home; so, here we are, such a mob of us."

Chatworth thought of the swell mob; but he could

not but admire the conduct of Mrs. Falcon, particularly when he contrasted it with the behaviour of her more scrupulous and less intrepid husband. The Gipsy incorporated herself with the company in an instant, while the Red Rover stood bowing, stammering, hesitating, protesting, and making absurd and inconsistent excuses; just as if a pirate were to jump on the deck of a prize, sword in hand, then suddenly take a fit of re­morse and sink from a Paul Jones into a Paul Pry, with "I hope I don't intrude," instead of a cut at the captain's throat. In cases of intrusion, like the present, the only course the intruders can take to palliate the enormity of the outrage, is to slip as quietly and speedily as possible into the agitated circle, and endeavour by easy impudence to efface as speedily as they can, the broad line of distinction which society in, drawing between the enlisted guest and the volunteer.

"Dear Mrs. Falcon, this is so good of you," said Mrs. Bompas, looking miraculously gracious, as she rose in her languid way to welcome the nomadic tribe. But the happy person on the occasion was little Paulina, who jumped about her parents and kissed them as if she had never expected to see them more. Then she made the same demonstrations of joy towards her sisters and small brother, embracing them as if they had just returned from Australia. In fact, she had not seen any of them for a long time, and had a vast deal of childish tenderness bottled up, which now gushed forth, like Champagne escaping from the flask.

“What will you eat?” said Bompas, addressing the new arrivals generally.

Falcon muttered something about an early dinner, and said; "I'll just pick the back-bone of a chicken," looking like the hungriest wolf in the Pyrenees.

"Don't be foolish, Mr. Falcon," said his intrepid wife; "you know you have not dined; there's nothing to be ashamed of, I'm sure, in dropping in to see one's dear old friends in this quiet way-now, is there, dear Mrs. Bompas?"

"Oh, no, no, indeed, quite the contrary."

"Falcon is always so modest and sheepish; but I say there is as much real hospitality, and twice as much domestic enjoyment, in this sort of thing as in giving solemn stupid dinners one's-self, that nobody cares to come to. But I do believe I am the most domestic wo­man in the world."

Chatworth looked at Bompas, and Bompas looked at Chatworth.

"What will you eat, Mrs. Falcon?"

"I'll have some of that roast veal with a slice of ham.

As to the Falcon girls and Willy, their sister Paulina scarcely allowed any body to pay them any attention but herself.

"More chicken, Willy?-Emily has got no veal- Dorothy Bompas, help Lucy to peas. Oh, mamma, I have been so attentive to my singing-I can sing 'Home sweet Home.' "

"Another commerce of glances took place between Bompas and Chatworth.

"And I hope, my love," said Mrs. Falcon, sotto voce, "you have not neglected your dancing."

"Mamma, there's no dancing-master," whispered Paulina, plaintively; "do make Mrs. Bompas get a dancing-master."

"Really, Mr. Bompas, this is taking your house by storm," said Falcon, laying down his knife and fork, after eating a prodigious dinner.

"An Englishman's house is his castle," replied the benignant host, "and castles are made to be stormed."

"A new version of the maxim," said Chatworth.

"A very hospitable one," said Falcon.

"Mr. Falcon, take a glass of Madeira? Mr. Moore will join us."

"Do you remember the story of Voltaire and the abbe?" said Chatworth.

"No; what is it?"

"The abbe used to visit Voltaire at the Chateau of Ferney, and his visits were visitations. 'M. l'Abbe,' said Voltaire, one morning, 'how do you differ from Don Quixote?' 'I can't guess,' said the abbe. 'Why, sir, the Don mistook an inn for a castle, and you mis­take a castle for an inn.' "

Falcon was a hardened moss-trooper, or he would have felt this palpable hit, which Chatworth, however, had no right to make, as it was no castle of his that was stormed.

"Mrs. Falcon, you and I must have a glass of Cham­pagne," said Bompas, with redoubled cordiality.

"And where are you now?" asked the mother Bompas.

"I really can hardly say where we are; in fact, we are nowhere. You know the life Mr. Falcon leads me.

If we are in one place more than another, we are at poor Mrs. Freeman's in Harley-street."

It is impossible to conjecture what the gipsy might proceeded to say of the family in whose house she lodged, had not Mrs. Bompas seasonably presented "poor Mrs. Freeman's" brother, Mr. Richard Chatworth.

"I call all my pets poor," said the imperturbable Mrs. Falcon, beaming in her most gracious manner on the gentleman introduced to her. “I always say, the poor Freemans, the poor Horngreens, and the poor Bom-pases.”

"And I have often heard my sister sp