produced Miss Steele. How Miss Steele should have failed to please, still astonishes me. Pliant, soothing, cheerful, mild, with a wonderful command of countenance and of temper, a smiling aspect, a soft voice, a perpetual habit of assentation, and such a power over the very brute beasts, that Flora would get up to meet her, and Daphne would wag her tail at her approach—a compliment which that illustrious pug never paid before to woman. Every heart in Chapel Street did Miss Steele win, except the invulnerable heart of Mrs. Patience. She felt the falseness. The honey cloyed; and before two months were over, Miss Steele had followed the nieces. After this her decline was rapid, and her latter days much tormented by legacy-hunters. A spendthrift nephew besieged her in a morning-a miserly cousin came to lose his sixpences to her at backgammon of an afternoon -a subtle attorney and an oily physician had each an eye to her hoards, if only in the form of an executorship; and her old butler, and still older housekeeper, already rich by their savings in her service, married, that they might share together the expected spoil. She died, and disappointed them all. Three wills were found. In the first, she divided her whole fortune between Flora and Daphne, and their offspring, under the direction of six trustees. In the second, she made the County-hospital her heir. In the third, the legal and effectual will, after formally disinheriting the rest of her relations, she bequeathed her whole estate, real and personal, to her honest niece Patience Wither, as a reward for her independence. And never was property better bestowed; for Patience the Second added all that was wanting to the will of Patience the First; supplied every legacy of charity and of kindness; provided for the old servants and the old pets, and had sufficient left to secure her own comfort with a man as upright and as downright as herself. They are the most English couple of my acquaintance, and the happiest. Long may they continue so! And all this happiness is owing to the natural right-mindedness and sturdy perception of character of my cross godmamma. THE MOLE-CATCHER. THERE are no more delightful or unfailing associations than those afforded by the various operations of the husbandman, and the changes on the fair face of nature. We all know that busy troops of reapers come with the yellow corn; whilst the yellow leaf brings a no less busy train of ploughmen and seedsmen preparing the ground for fresh harvests; that woodbines and wild roses, flaunting in the blossomy hedge-rows, give token of the gay bands of haymakers which enliven the meadows; and that the primroses, which begin to unfold their pale stars by the side of the green lanes, bear marks of the slow and weary female processions, the gangs of tired yet talkative bean-setters, who defile twice a day through the intricate mazes of our cross-country roads. These are general associations, as well known and as universally recognized as the union of mince-pies and Christmas. I have one, more private and peculiar, one, perhaps, the more strongly impressed on my mind, because the impression may be almost confined to myself. The full flush of violets which, about the middle of March, seldom fails to perfume the whole earth, always brings to my recollection one solitary and silent coadjutor of the husbandman's labours, as unlike a violet as possible-Isaac Bint, the mole-catcher. I used to meet him every spring, when we lived at our old house, whose park-like paddock, with its finely-clumped oaks and elms, and its richly-timbered hedge-rows, edging into wild, rude, and solemn fir-plantations, dark, and rough, and hoary, formed for so many years my constant and favourite walk. Here, especially under the great horse-chestnut, and where the bank rose high and naked above the lane, crowned only with a tuft of golden broom; here the sweetest and prettiest of wild flowers, whose very name hath a charm, grew like a carpet under one's feet, enamelling the young green grass with their white and purple blossoms, and loading the air with their delicious fragrance; here I used to come almost every morning, during the violet-tide: and here almost every morning I was sure to meet Isaac Bint. I think that he fixed himself the more firmly in my memory by his singular discrepancy with the beauty and cheerfulness of the scenery and the season. Isaac is a tall, lean, gloomy personage, with whom the clock of life seems to stand still. He has looked sixtyfive for these last twenty years, although his dark hair and beard, and firm manly stride, almost contradict the evidence of his sunken cheeks and deeply-lined forehead. The stride is awful: he hath the stalk of a ghost. His whole air and demeanour savour of one that comes from under-ground. His appearance is "of the earth, earthy." His clothes, hands, and face, are of the colour of the mould in which he delves. The little round traps which hang behind him over one shoulder, as well as the strings of dead moles which embellish the other, are encrusted with dirt like a tomb-stone; and the staff which he plunges into the little hillocks, by which he traces the course of his small quarry, returns a hollow sound, as if tapping on the lid of a coffin. Images of the church-yard come, one does not know how, with his presence. Indeed he does officiate as assistant to the sexton in his capacity of grave-digger, chosen, as it should seem, from a natural fitness; a fine sense of congruity in good Joseph Reed, the functionary in question, who felt, without knowing why, that, of all men in the parish, Isaac Bint was best fitted to that solemn office. His remarkable gift of silence adds much to the impression produced by his remarkable figure. I don't think that I ever heard him speak three words in my life. An approach of that bony hand to that earthy leather cap was the greatest effort of courtesy that my daily salutations could extort from him. For this silence, Isaac has reasons good. He hath a reputation to support. His words are too precious to be wasted. Our mole-catcher, ragged as he looks, is the wise man of the village, the oracle of the village-inn, foresees the weather, charms away agues, tells fortunes by the stars, and writes notes upon the almanac-turning and twisting about the predictions after a fashion so ingenious, that it is a moot point which is oftenest wrong-Isaac Bint, or Francis Moore. In one eminent instance, our friend was, however, eminently right. He had the good luck to prophesy, before sundry witnesses-some of them sober -in the tap-room of the Bell-he then sitting, pipe in mouth, on the settle at the right-hand side of the fire, whilst Jacob Frost occupied the left; he had the good fortune to foretell, on New Year's Day 1812, the downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte-a piece of soothsayership which has established his reputation, and dumfounded all doubters and cavillers ever since; but which would certainly have been more striking if he had not annually uttered the same prediction, from the same place, from the time the aforesaid Napoleon became first consul. But the small circumstance is entirely overlooked by Isaac and his admirers, and they believe in him, and he believes in the stars, more firmly than ever. Our mole-catcher is, as might be conjectured, an old bachelor. Your married man hath more of this world about him-is less, so to say, planet-struck. A thorough old bachelor is Isaac, a contemner and maligner of the sex, a complete and decided womanhater. Female frailty is the only subject on which he hath ever been known to dilate; he will not even charm away their agues, or tell their fortunes, and, indeed, holds them to be unworthy the notice of the stars. the owner be solitary, his demesne is sufficiently populous. A long row of bee-hives extends along the warmest side of the garden for Isaac's honey is celebrated far and near; a pig occupies a commodious sty, at one corner; and large flocks of ducks and geese (for which the Penge, whose glades are intersected by water, is famous) are generally waiting round a back gate leading to a spacious shed, far larger than Isaac's own cottage, which serves for their feeding and roosting-place. The great tameness of all these creaturesfor the ducks and geese flutter round him the moment he approaches, and the very pig follows him like a dog-gives no equivocal testimony of the kindness of our mole-catcher's nature. A circumstance of recent occurrence puts his humanity beyond doubt. Amongst the probable causes of Isaac's dislike to women, may be reckoned the fact of his living in a female neighbourhood (for the Penge is almost peopled with duck-rearers and goose-crammers of the duck and goose gender) and being himself exceedingly unpopular amongst the fair poultry-feeders of that watery vicinity. He beat them at their own weapons; produced at Midsummer geese fit for Michaelmas; and raised ducks so precocious, that the gardeners complained of them as forerunning their vegetable accompaniments; and "panting peas toiled after them in vain." In short the Naïads of the Penge had the mortification to find themselves driven out of B-market by an interloper, and that interloper a man, who had no right to possess any skill in an accomplishment so exclusively feminine as duck-rearing; and being no ways inferior in another female accomplishment, called scolding, to their sister-nymphs of Billingsgate, they set up a clamour and a cackle which might rival the din of their own gooseries at feeding-time, and would inevitably have frightened from the field any competitor less impenetrable than our hero. But Isaac is not a man to shrink from so small an evil as female objurgation. He stalked through it all in mute disdainlooking now at his mole-traps, and now at the stars-pretending not to hear, and very probably not hearing. At first this scorn, more provoking than any retort, only excited his enemies to fresh attacks; but one cannot be always answering another person's silence. The flame which had blazed so fiercely, at last burnt itself out, and peace reigned once more in the green alleys of Penge-wood. One, however, of his adversaries-his near No woman contaminates his household. He lives on the edge of a pretty bit of woodland scenery, called the Penge, in a snug cottage of two rooms, of his own building, sur-est neighbour-still remained unsilenced. rounded by a garden cribbed from the waste, well fenced with quickset, and well stocked with fruit trees, herbs, and flowers. One large apple-tree extends over the roof-a pretty bit of colour when in blossom, contrasted with the thatch of the little dwelling, and relieved by the dark wood behind. Although Margery Grover was a very old and poor woman, whom age and disease had bent almost to the earth; shaken by palsy, pinched by penury, and soured by misfortune-a moving bundle of misery and rags. Two centuries ago she would have been burnt for a witch; now she starved and grumbled on the parish allowance; trying to eke out a scanty subsistence on the dubious profits gained by the produce of two geese and a lame gander, once the unmolested tenants of a greenish pool, situate right between her dwelling and Isaac's, but whose watery dominion had been invaded by his flourishing colony. This was the cause of feud; and although Isaac would willingly, from a mingled sense of justice and of pity, have yielded the point to the poor old creature, especially as ponds are there almost as plentiful as blackberries, yet it was not so easy to control the habits and inclinations of their feathered subjects, who all perversely fancied that particular pool; and various accidents and skirmishes occurred, in which the ill-fed and weak birds of Margery had generally the worst of the fray. One of her early goslings was drowned-an accident which may happen even to water-fowl; and her lame gander, a sort of pet with the poor old woman, injured in his well leg; and Margery vented curses as bitter as those of Sycorax: and Isaac, certainly the most superstitious personage in the parish-the most thorough believer in his own gifts and predictionswas fain to nail a horse-shoe on his door for the defence of his property, and to wear one of his own ague charms about his neck for his personal protection. but those who know the careful ways to which necessity trains cottage children, would deem credible; and Margery, a woman of strong passions, strong prejudices, and strong affections, who had lived in and for the desolate boy, felt the approach of death embittered by the certainty that the work-house, always the scene of her dread and loathing, would be the only refuge for the poor orphan. Death, however, came on visibly and rapidly; and she sent for the overseer to beseech him to put Harry to board in some decent cottage; she could not die in peace until he had promised; the fear of the innocent child's being contaminated by wicked boys and godless women preyed upon her soul; she implored, she conjured. The overseer, a kind but timid man, hesitated, and was beginning a puzzled speech about the bench and the vestry, when another voice was heard from the door of the cottage. "Margery," said our friend Isaac, "will you trust Harry to me? I am a poor man, to be sure; but between earning and saving, there'll be enough for me and little Harry. T is as good a boy as ever lived, and I'll try to keep him so. Trust him to me, and I'll be a father to him. I can't say more." "God bless thee, Isaac Bint! God bless thee!" was all poor Margery could reply. Poor old Margery! A hard winter came; They were the last words she ever spoke. and the feeble, tottering creature shook in the And little Harry is living with our good molefrosty air like an aspen-leaf; and the hovel in catcher, and is growing plump and rosy; and which she dwelt-for nothing could prevail Margery's other pet, the lame gander, lives on her to try the shelter of the work-house-and thrives with them too. shook like herself at every blast. She was not quite alone either in the world or in her poor hut: husband, children, and grandchildren had passed away; but one young and innocent being, a great-grandson, the last of her de- MADEMOISELLE THERESE. scendants, remaining a helpless dependant on one almost as helpless as himself. Little Harry Grover was a shrunken, stunted boy, of five years old; tattered and squalid, like his grandame, and, at first sight, presented almost as miserable a specimen of childhood, as Margery herself did of age. There was even a likeness between them; although the fierce blue eye of Margery had in the boy a mild appealing look, which entirely changed the whole expression of the countenance. A gentle and peaceful boy was Harry, and, above all, a useful. It was wonderful how many ears of corn in the autumn, and sticks in the winter, his little hands could pick up! how well he could make a fire, and boil the kettle, and sweep the hearth, and cram the goslings! Never was a handier boy or a trustier; and when the united effects of cold, and age and rheumatism confined poor Margery to her poor bed, the child continued to perform his accustomed offices; fetching the money from the vestry, buying the loaf at the baker's, keeping house, and nursing the sick woman, with a kindness and thoughtfulness, which none ONE of the prettiest dwellings in our neighbourhood, is the Lime Cottage at BurleyHatch. It consists of a small low-browed habitation, so entirely covered with jessamine, honeysuckle, passion-flowers, and china-roses, as to resemble a bower, and is placed in the centre of a large garden,- turf and flowers before, vegetables and fruit trees behind, backed by a superb orchard, and surrounded by a quickset hedge, so thick, and close, and regular, as to form an impregnable defence to the territory which it encloses—a thorny rampart, a living and growing chevaux-de-frise. On either side of the next gravel-walk, which leads from the outer gate to the door of the cottage, stand the large and beautiful trees to which it owes its name; spreading their strong, broad shadow over the turf beneath, and sending, on a summer afternoon, their rich, spicy fragrance half across the irregular village green, dappled with wood and water, and gay with sheep, cattle, and children, which divides them, at the distance of a quarter of a mile, from the little hamlet of Burley, its venerable church and handsome rectory, and its short straggling street of cottages, and country shops. Such is the habitation of Thérèse de G., an emigrée of distinction, whose aunt having married an English officer, was luckily able to afford her niece an asylum during the horrors of the Revolution, and to secure to her a small annuity, and the Lime Cottage after her death. There she has lived for these five-andthirty years, gradually losing sight of her few and distant foreign connexions, and finding all her happiness in her pleasant home and her kind neighbours-a standing lesson of cheerfulness and contentment. have invented sundry legends to excuse the solecism, and talk of duels fought pour l'amour de ses beaux yeux, and of a betrothed lover guillotined in the Revolution. And the thing may have been so; although one meets everywhere with old maids who have been pretty, and whose lovers have not been guillotined; and although Mademoiselle Thérèse has not, to do her justice, the least in the world the air of a heroine crossed in love. The thing may be so; but I doubt it much. I rather suspect our fair Demoiselle of having been in her youth a little of a flirt. Even during her residence at Burley-Hatch, hath not she indulged in divers very distant, very discreet, very decorous, but still very evident flirtations? Did not Doctor Abdy, the portly, ruddy schoolmaster of B., dangle after her for three mortal years, holidays excepted? And did she not refuse him at last? And Mr. Foreclose, the thin, withered, wrinkled city solicitor, a man, so to say, smoke-dried, who comes down every year to Burley for the air, did not he do suit and service to her during four long vacations, with the same il success? Was not Sir Thomas himself a little smitten? Nay, even now, does not the good Major, a halting veteran of seventy-but really it is too bad to tell tales out of the parish-all that is certain is, that Mademoiselle Thérèse might have changed her name long before now, had she so chosen ; and that it is most probable that she will never change it at all. A very popular person is Mademoiselle Thérèse-popular both with high and low; for the prejudice which the country people almost universally entertain against foreigners, vanished directly before the charm of her manners, the gaiety of her heart, and the sunshine of a temper that never knows a cloud. She is so kind to them too, so liberal of the produce of her orchard and garden, so full of resource in their difficulties, and so sure to afford sympathy if she have nothing else to give, that the poor all idolize Mademoiselle. Among the rich, she is equally beloved. No party is complete without the pleasant Frenchwoman, whose amenity and cheerfulness, her perfect, general politeness, her attention to the old, the poor, the stupid and the neglected, are felt to be invaluable in society. Her conversation is not very powerful either, nor very Her household consists of her little maid brilliant; she never says any thing remark- Betsy, a cherry-cheeked, blue-eyed country able-but then it is so good-natured, so gen-lass, brought up by herself, who, with a full uine, so unpretending, so constantly up and alive, that one would feel its absence more than that of a more showy and ambitious talker; to say nothing of the charm which it derives from her language, which is alternately the most graceful and purest French, and the most diverting and absurd broken English; a dialect in which, whilst contriving to make herself perfectly understood both by gentle and simple, she does also contrive, in the course of an hour, to commit more blunders, than all the other foreigners in England make in a month. clumsy figure, and a fair, innocent, unmeaning countenance, copies, as close as these obstacles will permit, the looks and gestures of her alert and vivacious mistress, and has even caught her broken English; - of a fat lapdog, called Fido, silky, sleepy, and sedate; and of a beautiful white Spanish ass, called Donnabella, an animal docile and spirited, far beyond the generality of that despised race, who draws her little donkey-chaise half the country over, runs to her the moment she sees her, and eats roses, bread and apples from her hand; but who, accustomed to be fed and groomed, harnessed and driven only by females, resists and rebels the moment she is approached by the rougher sex; has overturned more boys, and kicked more men, than any donkey in the kingdom; and has acquired such a character for restiveness among the grooms in the neighbourhood, that when Mademoiselle Thérèse goes out to dinner, Betsy is fain to go with her to drive Donnabella home again, and to return to fetch her mistress in the evening. Her appearance betrays her country almost as much as her speech. She is a Frenchlooking little personage, with a slight, active figure, exceedingly nimble and alert in every movement; a round and darkly-complexioned face, somewhat faded and passée, but still striking from the laughing eyes, the bland and brilliant smile, and the great mobility of expression. Her features, pretty as they are, want the repose of an English countenance; and her air, gesture, and dress, are decidedly foreign, all alike deficient in the English If every body is delighted to receive this charm of quietness. Nevertheless, in her most welcome visiter, so is every body deyouth, she must have been pretty so pretty lighted to accept her graceful invitations, and that some of our young ladies scandalized at meet to eat strawberries at Burley-Hatch. the idea of finding their favourite an old maid, | Oh, how pleasant are those summer after noons, sitting under the blossomed limes, with the sun shedding a golden light through the broad branches, the bees murmuring overhead, roses and lilies all about us, and the choicest fruit served up in wicker baskets of her own making-itself a picture! the guests looking so pleased and happy, and the kind hostess the gayest and happiest of all. Those are pleasant meetings; nor are her little winter parties less agreeable, when two or three female friends assembled round their coffee, she will tell thrilling stories of that terrible Revolution, so fertile in great crimes and great virtues; or gayer anecdotes of the brilliant days preceding that convulsion, the days which Madame de Genlis has described so well, when Paris was the capital of pleasure, and amusement the business of life; illustrating her descriptions by a series of spirited drawings of costumes and characters done by herself, and always finishing by producing a group of Louis Seize, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, and Madame Elizabeth, as she had last seen them at Versailles-the only recollection that ever brings tears into her smiling eyes. man! he had not seen her for these thirty years;) Paris was a new city; the French were a new people; she missed the sea-coal fires; and for the stunted orange-trees at the Thuilleries, what were they compared with the blossomed limes of Burley-Hatch! LOST AND FOUND. thing not unlike the good fairy herself, in the pleasant earthly guise of an old friend. But I may as well begin my story. ANY body may be lost in a wood. It is well for me to have so good an excuse for my wanderings; for I am rather famous for such misadventures, and have sometimes been accused by my kindest friends of committing intentional blunders, and going astray out of malice prepense. To be sure, when in two successive rambles, I contrived to get mazed on Burghfield Common, and bewildered in Kibe's Lane, those exploits did seem to overpass the common limits of stupidity. But in a wood, and a strange wood, a new place, a fresh country, untrodden ground beneath the feet, unknown landmarks before the eyes, wiser folks than I might require the silken Mademoiselle Thérèse's loyalty to the clue of Rosamond, or the hag of ashes given Bourbons, was in truth a very real feeling. to Finette Cendron (Anglice, Cinderella) by Her family had been about the court, and she the good fairy her godmother, to help them had imbibed an enthusiasm for the royal suf- home again. Now my luck exceeded even ferers natural to a young and a warm heart-hers of the Glass Slipper, for I found someshe loved the Bourbons, and hated Napoleon with like ardour. All her other French feelings had for some time been a little modified. She was not quite so sure as she had been, that France was the only country, and Paris the only city of the world; that Shakspeare was a barbarian, and Milton no poet; that the perfume of English limes was nothing compared to French orange trees; that the sun never shone in England; and that sea-coal fires were bad things. She still, indeed, would occasionally make these assertions, especially if dared to make them; but her faith in them was shaken. Her loyalty to her legitimate king, was, however, as strong as ever, and that loyalty had nearly cost us our dear Mademoiselle. After the Restoration, she hastened as fast as a steam-boat and diligence could carry her, to enjoy the delight of seeing once more the Bourbons at the Thuilleries; took leave, between smiles and tears, of her friends, and of Burley-Hatch, carrying with her a branch of the lime-tree, then in blossom, and commissioning her old lover, Mr. Foreclose, to dispose of the cottage: but in less than three months, luckily before Mr. Foreclose had found a purchaser, Mademoiselle Thérèse came home again. She complained of nobody; but times were altered. The house in which she was born was pulled down; her friends were scattered; her kindred dead; Madame did not remember her (she had probably never heard of her in her life;) the king did not know her again (poor About two years ago we had the misfortune to lose one of the most useful and popular inbitants of our village, Mrs. Bond, the butterwoman. She-for although there was a very honest and hard-working Farmer Bond, who had the honour to be Mrs. Bond's husband, she was so completely the personage of the family, that nobody ever thought of himshe lived on a small dairy-farm, at the other side of the parish, where she had reared ten children in comfort and respectability, contriving, in all years, and in all seasons, to be flourishing, happy, and contented, and to drive her tilted cart twice a week into B., laden with the richest butter, the freshest eggs, and the finest poultry of the county. Never was a market-woman so reliable as Mrs. Bond, so safe to deal with, or so pleasant to look at. She was a neat comely woman of five-and-forty, or thereabout, with dark hair, laughing eyes, a bright smile, and a brighter complexion-red and white like a daisy. People used to say how pretty she must have been; but I think she was then in the prime of her good looks; just as a fullblown damask rose is more beautiful than the same flower in the bud. Very pleasant she was to look at, and still pleasanter to talk to; she was so gentle, so cheerful, so respectful, and so kind. Every body in the village loved Mrs. Bond. Even |
