lag miserably behind the time; I never hear of a death till after the funeral, nor of a wedding till I read it in the papers; and, when people talk of reports and rumours, they undo me. I should be obliged to run away from the tea-tables, if I had not taken the resolution to look wise and say nothing, and live on my old reputation. Indeed, even now, Lucy's fund is not entirely exhausted; things have not quite done happening. I know nothing new; but my knowledge of by-gone passages is absolute; I can prophesy past events like a gipsy.

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Scattered amongst her great merits Lucy had a few small faults, as all persons should have. She had occasionally an aptness to take offence where none was intended, and then the whole house bore audible testimony to her displeasure: she used to scour through half-a-dozen doors in a minute for the mere purpose banging them after her. She had rather more fears than were quite convenient of ghosts and witches, and thunder, and earwigs, and various other real and unreal sights and sounds, and thought nothing of rousing half the family in the middle of the night at the first symptom of a thunder-storm or an apparition. She had a terrible genius for music, and a tremendously powerful shrill high voice. Oh! her door-clapping was nothing to her singing! it rang through one's head like the screams of a peacock. Lastly, she was a sad

flirt; she had about twenty lovers whilst she lived with us, probably more, but upwards of twenty she acknowledged. Her master, who watched with great amusement this uninterrupted and intricate succession of favourites, had the habit of calling her by the name of the reigning beau-Mrs. Charles, Mrs. John, Mrs. Robert; so that she has answered in her time to as many masculine appellations as would serve to supply a large family with a "commodity of good names." Once he departed from this custom, and called her "Jenny Denison." On her inquiring the reason, we showed her "Old Mortality," and asked if she could not guess. "Dear me," said she, "why Jenny Denison had only two !" Amongst Lucy's twenty were three one-eyed lovers, like the three one-eyed calendars in the " Arabian Nights." They were much about the same period, nearly contemporaries, and one of them had almost carried off the fair Helen. If he had had two eyes, his success would have been certain. She said yes and no, and yes again; he was a very nice young man-but that one eye-that unlucky one eye e-and the being rallied on her three calendars. There was no getting over that one eye she said no, once more, and stood firm. And yet the pendulum might have continued to vibrate many times longer, had it not been fixed by the athletic charms of a gigantic London tailor, a superb man, really; black-haired,

black-eyed, six feet high, and large in proportion. He came to improve the country fashions, and fixed his shop-board in a cottage so near us that his garden was only divided from our lawn by a plantation full of acacias and honeysuckles, where "the air smelt wooingly." It followed of course that he should make love to Lucy, and that Lucy should listen. All was speedily settled; as soon as he should be established in a good business, which, from his incomparable talent at cutting out, nobody could doubt, they were to be married. But they had not calculated on the perversity of country taste; he was too good a workman; his suits fitted over well; his employers missed certain accustomed awkwardnesses and redundancies which passed for beauties; besides, the stiffness and tightness which distinguished the new coat of the ancien regime, were wanting in the make of the new. The shears of our Bond-street cutter were as powerful as the wooden sword of Harlequin; he turned his clowns into gentlemen, and their brother clodhoppers laughed at them, and they were ashamed. So the poor tailor lost his customers and his credit; and, just as he had obtained Lucy's consent to the marriage, he walked off one fair morning, and was never heard of more. Lucy's absorbing feeling on this catastrophe was astonishment, pure unmixed astonishment! One would have thought that she considered fickleness as a female privilege, and had

never heard of a man deserting a woman in her life. For three days she could only wonder; then came great indignation, and a little, a very little grief, which showed itself not so much in her words, which were chiefly such disclaimers as "I don't care! very lucky! happy escape!" and so on, as in her goings and doings, her aversion to the poor acacia grove, and even to the sight and smell of honeysuckles, her total loss of me> mory, and, above all, in the distaste she showed to new conquests. She paid her faithless suitor the compliment of remaining loverless for three weary months; and even when she relented a little, she admitted no fresh adorer, nothing but an old hanger-on; one not quite discarded during the tailor's reign; one who had dangled after her during the long courtship of the three calendars; one who was the handiest and most complaisant of wooers, always ready to fill up an interval, like a book, which can be laid aside when company comes in, and resumed a month afterwards at the very page and line where the reader left off. I think it was an affair of convenience and amusement on both sides. Lucy never intended to marry this commodious stopper of love-gaps; and he, though he courted her for ten mortal years, never made a direct offer, till after the banns were published between her and her present husband then, indeed, he said he was sorry-he had hoped-was it too late? and so forth. Ah! his sorrow

was nothing to ours, and, when it came to the point, nothing to Lucy's. She cried every day for a fortnight, and had not her successor in office, the new housemaid, arrived, I do really believe that this lover would have shared the fate of the many successors to the unfortunate tailor.

I hope that her choice has been fortunate; it is cer tainly very different from what we all expected. The happy man had been a neighbour, (not on the side of the acacia-trees,) and on his removal to a greater distance the marriage took place. Poor dear Lucy! her spouse is the greatest possible contrast to herself; ten years younger at the very least; well-looking, but with no expression good or bad-I don't think he could smile, if he would-assuredly he never tries; well made, but as stiff as a poker; I dare say he never ran three yards in his life; perfectly steady, sober, honest, and industrious; but so young, so grave, so dull ! one of your "demure boys," as Falstaff calls them, “that never come to proof." You might guess a mile off that he was a schoolmaster, from the swelling pomposity of gait, the solemn decorum of manner, the affectation of age and wisdom, which contrast so oddly with his young unmeaning face. The moment he speaks you are certain. Nobody but a village pedagogue ever did or ever could talk like Mr. Brown; ever displayed such elaborate politeness, such a study of

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