appreciated his talents, and would as soon listen to Tom sohoing as to old Tray giving tongue. miserable moor! Flat, marshy, dingy, bare. Here that piece of green treachery, a bog; there parched, and pared, and shrivelled, and black with smoke and ashes; utterly desolate and wretched every where, except where amidst the desolation blossomed, as in mock Nor was his conversation less agreeable to the other part of the company. Servants and masters were equally desirous to secure Tom. Besides his general and professional familiar-ery, the enamelled gentianella. No hares ity with beasts and birds, their ways and doings, a knowledge so minute and accurate, that it might have put to shame many a professed naturalist, he had no small acquaintance with the goings-on of that unfeathered biped called man; in short, he was, next after Lucy, who recognized his rivalry by hating, decrying, and undervaluing him, by far the best newsgatherer of the country side. His news he of course picked up on the civilized side of the parish, (there is no gossiping in the forest,) partly at that well-frequented inn the Red Lion, of which Tom was a regular and noted supporter-partly amongst his several employers, and partly by his own sagacity. In the matter of marriages, (pairings he was wont to call them,) he relied chiefly on his own skill in noting certain preliminary indications; and certainly for a guesser by profession and a very bold one, he was astonishingly often right. At the alehouse especially, he was of the first authority. An air of mild importance, a diplomatic reserve on some points, great smoothness of speech, and that gentleness which is so often the result of conscious power, made him there an absolute ruler. Perhaps the effect of these causes might be a little aided by the latent dread which that power inspired in others. Many an exploit had proved that Tom Cordery's one arm was fairly worth any two on the common. The pommelling of Bob Arlott, and the levelling of Jem Serle to the earth by one swing of a huge old hare, (which unusual weapon was by the way the first-slain of Mayflower, on its way home to us in that walking eupboard, his pocket, when the unlucky rencontre with Jem Serle broke two heads, the dead and the living,) arguments such as these might have some cogency at the Red Lion. But he managed every body, as your gentlemannered person is apt to do. Even the rude 'squires and rough farmers, his temporary masters, he managed, particularly as far as concerned the beat, and was sure to bring them round to his own peculiar fancies and prejudices, however strongly their own wishes might turn them aside from the direction indicated, and however often Tom's sagacity in that instance might have been found at fault. Two spots in the large wild enclosures into which the heath had been divided were his especial favourites; the Hundred Acres, alias the Poor Allotment, alias the Burnt Common Do any or all of these titles convey any notion of the real destination of that many named place? a piece of moor-land portioned out to serve for fuel to the poor of the parish) -this was one. Oh the barrenness of this ever came there; they had too much taste. Tom was not, however, without that strong sense of natural beauty which they who live amongst the wildnesses and fastnesses of nature so often exhibit. One spot, where the common trenches on the civilized world, was scarcely less his admiration than mine. It is a high hill, half covered with furze and heath, and broom, and sinking abruptly down to a large pond, almost a lake, covered with wild water-fowl. The ground, richly clothed with wood, oak and beech and elm, rises on the other side with equal abruptness, as if shutting in those glassy waters from all but the sky, which shines so brightly in their clear bosom: just in the bottom peeps a small sheltered farm, whose wreaths of light smoke and the white glancing wings of the wildducks, as they flit across the lake, are all that give token of motion or of life. I have stood there in utter oblivion of greyhound or of hare, till moments have swelled to minutes, and minutes to hours; and so has Tom, conveying by his exclamations of delight at its "pleasantness," exactly the same feeling which a poet or a painter (for it breathes the very spirit of calm and sunshiny beauty that a master-painter loves) would express by different but not truer praise. He called his own home "pleasant" too; and there, though one loves to hear any home so called-there, I must confess, that favourite phrase, which I like almost as well as they who have no other, did seem rather misapplied. And yet it was finely placed, very finely. It stood in a sort of defile, where a road almost perpendicular wound from the top of a steep abrupt hill, crowned with a tuft of old Scottish firs, into a dingle of fern and wild brushwood. A shallow, sullen stream oozed from the bank on one side, and, after forming a rude channel across the road, sank into a dark, deep pool, half hidden among the sallows. Behind these sallows, in a nook between them and the hill, rose the uncouth and shapeless cottage of Tom Cordery. It is a scene which hangs upon the eye and the memory, striking, grand, almost sublime, and above all eminently foreign. No English_painter would choose such a subject for an English landscape; no one in a picture would take it for English. It might pass for one of those scenes which have furnished models to Salvator Rosa. Tom's cottage was, however, very thoroughly national and characteristic; a low, ruinous hovel, the door of which was fastened with a sedulous attention to security, that contrasted strangely with the tattered thatch of the roof, and the half-broken windows. No garden, no pigsty, no pens for geese, none of the usual signs of cottage habitation:-yet the house was covered with nondescript dwellings, and the very walls were animated with their extraordinary tenants; pheasants, partridges, rabbits, tame wild ducks, half-tame hares, and their enemies by nature and education, the ferrets, terriers, and mongrels of whom his retinue consisted. Great ingenuity had been evinced in keeping separate these jarring elements; and by dint of hutches, cages, fences, kennels and half a dozen little hurdled enclosures, resembling the sort of courts which children are apt to build round their card-houses, peace was in general tolerably well preserved. Frequent sounds, however, of fear or anger, as their several instincts were aroused, gave token that it was but a forced and hollow truce, and at such times the clamour was prodigious. Tom had the remarkable tenderness for animals when domesticated, which is so often found in those whose sole vocation seems to be their destruction in the field; and the one long, straggling, unceiled, barn-like room, which served for kitchen, bed-chamber, and hall, was cumbered with bipeds and quadrupeds of all kinds and descriptions-the sick, the delicate, the newlycaught, the lying in. In the midst of this menagerie sate Tom's wife, (for he was married, though without a family-married to a woman lame of a leg as he himself was minus an arm,) now trying to quiet her noisy inmates, now to outscold them. How long his friend the keeper would have continued to wink at this den of live game, none can say; the roof fairly fell in during the deep snow of last winter, killing, as poor Tom observed, two as fine litters of rabbits as ever were kittened. Remotely, I have no doubt that he himself fell a sacrifice to this misadventure. The overseer, to whom he applied to reinstate his beloved habitation, decided that the walls would never bear another roof, and removed him and his wife, as an especial favour, to a tidy, snug, comfortable room in the workhouse. The workhouse! From that, poor Tom visibly altered. He lost his hilarity and independence. It was a change such as he had himself often inflicted, a complete change of habits, a transition from the wild to the tame. No labour was demanded of him; he went about as before, finding hares, killing rats, selling brooms, but the spirit of the man was departed. He talked of the quiet of his old abode, and the noise of the new; complained of children and other bad company; and looked down on his neighbours with the sort of contempt with which a cock pheasant might regard a barn-door fowl. Most of all did he, braced into a gipsy-like defiance of wet and cold, grumble at the warmth and dryness of his apartment. He used to foretell that it would kill him, and assuredly it did so. Never could the typhus fever have found out that wild hill side, or have lurked under that broken roof. The free touch of the air would have chased the demon. Alas, poor Tom! warmth and snugness, and comfort, whole windows, and an entire ceiling, were the death of him. Alas, poor Tom! AN OLD BACHELOR. THERE is no effect of the subtle operation of the association of ideas more universal and more curious than the manner in which the most trivial circumstances recall particular persons to our memory. Sometimes these glances of recollection are purely pleasurable. Thus I have a double liking for a May-day, as being the birth-day of a dear friend whose fair idea bursts upon me with the first sunbeam of that glad morning; and I can never gravity of countenance and demeanour, a bald head most accurately powdered, and a very graceful bow-quite the pattern of an elderly man of fashion. His conversation was in excellent keeping with the calm imperturbability of his countenance and the sedate gravity of his manner,-smooth, dull, commonplace, exceedingly safe, and somewhat imposing. He spoke so little, that people really fell into the mistake of imagining that he thought; and the tone of decision with which he would advance some second-hand opinion, was well calculated to confirm the mistake. Gravity was certainly his chief characteristic, and yet it was not a clerical gravity either. He had none of the generic marks of his profession. Although perfectly decorous in life and word and thought, no stranger ever took Mr. Sidney for a clergyman. He never did any duty any where, that ever I heard of, except the agreeable duty of saying grace before dinner; and even that was often performed by some lay host, in pure forgetfulness of his guest's ordination. Indeed, but for the direction of his letters, and an eye to *** Rectory, I am persuaded that the circumstance might have slipped out of his own recollection. hear certain airs of Mozart and Handel without seeming to catch an echo of that sweetest voice in which I first learnt to love them. Pretty often, however, the point of association is less elegant, and occasionally it is tolerably ludicrous. We happened to-day to have for dinner a couple of wild-ducks, the first of the season; and as the master of the house, who is so little of an epicure that I am sure he would never while he lived, out of its feathers, know a wild-duck from a tame,-whilst he, with a little affectation of science, was squeezing the lemon and mixing Cayenne pepper with the gravy, two of us exclaimed in a breath," Poor Mr. Sidney !”—“ Ay," rejoined the squeezer of lemons, "poor Sidney! I think he would have allowed that these ducks were done even to half a turn." And then he told the story more elaborately to a young visiter, to whom Mr. Sidney was unknown; -how, after eating the best parts of a couple of wild-ducks, which all the company pronounced to be the finest and the best dressed wild-ducks ever brought to the table, that judicious critic in the gastronomic art limited the too sweeping praise by gravely asserting, that the birds were certainly excellent, and that the cookery would have been excellent also, had they not been roasted half a turn too much. Mr. Sidney has been dead these fifteen years; but no wild-ducks have ever ap-ishness, the little whims, the precise habits, peared on our homely board without recalling that observation. It is his memorable saying; his one good thing. Mr. Sidney was, as might be conjectured, an epicure; he was also an old bachelor, a clergyman, and senior fellow of **College, a post which he had long filled, being, although only a second son, so well provided for that he could afford to reject living after living in expectation of one favourite rectory, |to which he had taken an early fancy from the pleasantness of the air. Of the latter quality, indeed, he used to give an instance, which, however satisfactory as confirming his prepossession, could hardly have been quite agreeable, as preventing him from gratifying it; namely, the extraordinary and provoking longevity of the incumbent, who at upwards of ninety gave no sign of decay, and bade fair to emulate the age of old Parr. Whilst waiting for the expected living, Mr. Sidney, who disliked a college residence, built himself a very pretty house in our neighbourhood, which he called his home; and where he lived, as much as a love of Bath and Brighton and London and lords would let him. He counted many noble families amongst his near connections, and passed a good deal of his time at their country-seats-a life for which he was by character and habit peculiarly fitted. In person he was a tall stout gentlemanly man," about fifty, or by'r lady, inclining to threescore," with fine features, a composed His quality of old bachelor was more perceptible. There lurked under all his polish, well covered but not concealed, the quiet self the primness and priggishness of that disconsolate condition. His man Andrews, for instance, valet, groom, and body-servant abroad; butler, cook, caterer, and major d'omo at home; tall, portly, powdered and blackcoated as his master, and like him in all things but the knowing pig-tail which stuck out horizontally above his shirt-collar, giving a ludicrous dignity to his appearance;-Andrews, who, constant as the dial pointed nine, carried up his chocolate and shaving water, and regular as "the chimes at midnight," prepared his white-wine whey; who never forgot his gouty shoe in travelling, (once for two days he had a slight touch of that gentlemanly disorder,) and never gave him the newspaper unaired; to whom could this jewel of a valet, this matchless piece of clock-work belong, but an old bachelor? And his little dog Viper, unparagoned of terriers, black, sleek, sharp, and shrewish; who would beg and sneeze and fetch and carry like a Christian; eat olives and sweetmeats and mustard, drink coffee and wine and liqueurs ;-who but an old bachelor could have taught Viper his multifarious accomplishments? Little Viper was a most useful person in his way; for although Mr. Sidney was a very creditable acquaintance to meet on the King's highway, (your dull man, if he rides well, should never think of dismounting,) or even on the level ground of a carpet in the crowd of a large party; yet when he happened to drop in to take a family dinner-a pretty fre quent habit of his when in the country-then feelings. His genuine and unfeigned veneraViper's talents were inestimable in relieving tion was reserved for him who played a good the ennuï occasioned by that grave piece of gentility his master, “not only dull in himself, but the cause of dullness in others." Any thing to pass away the heavy hours, till whist or piquet relieved the female world from his intolerable silence. rubber, a praise he did not easily give. He was a capital player himself, and held all his country competitors, except one, in supreme and undisguised contempt, which they endured to admiration. I wonder they did not send him to Coventry. He was the most disagreeable partner in the world, and nearly as unpleasant an adversary; for he not only enforced the Pythagorean law of science, which makes one hate whist so, but used to distribute quite impartially to every one at table little disagreeable observations on every card they played. It was not scolding, or grumbling, or fretting; one has a sympathy with those expressions of feeling, and at the worst can scold again; it was a smooth polite commentary on the errors of the party, delivered in the calm tone of undoubted superiority with which a great critic will sometimes take a small poet, or a batch of poets, to task in a review. How the people could bear it!-but the world is a goodnatured world, and does not like a man the less for treating it scornfully. In other respects these visits were sufficiently perplexing. Every housewife can tell what a formidable guest is an epicure who comes to take pot-luck-how sure it is to be bad luck, especially when the unfortunate hostess lives five miles from a market-town. Mr. Sidney always came unseasonably, on washing-day, or Saturday, or the day before a great party. So sure as we had a scrap dinner, so sure came he. My dear mother, who with true benevolence and hospitality cared much for her guest's comfort and nothing for her own pride, used to grieve over his discomfiture, and try all that could be done by potted meats and omelettes, and little things tossed up on a sudden to amend the bill of fare. But cookery is an obstinate art, and will have its time; however you may force the component parts, there is no forcing a dinner. Mr. Sidney had the evil habit of arriving just as the last bell rang; and in spite of all the hurryscurry in the kitchen department, the new niceties and the old, homely dishes were sure to disagree. There was a total want of keep-beaten by his master in a snug game at double ing. The kickshaws were half raw, the solids were mere rags; the vegetables were cold, the soup was scalding; no shallots to the rump-steaks; no mushrooms with the broiled chicken; no fish; no oysters; no ice; no pineapple. Poor Mr. Sidney! He must have had a great regard for us to put up with our bad dinners. Perhaps the chance of a rubber had something to do with his visits to our house. If there be such a thing as a ruling passion, the love of whist was his. Cards were not merely the amusement, but the business of his life. I do not mean as a money-making speculation; for although he belonged to a fashionable club in London, and to every card-meeting of decent gentility within reach of his countryhome, he never went beyond a regular moderate stake, and could not be induced to bet even by the rashest defier of calculation, or the most provoking undervaluer of his play. It always seemed to me that he regarded whist as far too important and scientific a pursuit to be degraded into an affair of gambling. It had in his eyes all the dignity of a study; an acquirement equally gentlemanly and clerical. It was undoubtedly his test of ability. He had the value of a man of family and a man of the world, for rank, and wealth, and station, and dignities of all sorts. No human being entertained a higher respect for a king, a prince, a prime minister, a duke, a bishop, or a lord. But these were conventional So passed six evenings out of the seven with Mr. Sidney, for it was pretty well known that, on the rare occurrence of his spending a day at home without company, his fac-totum Andrews used to have the honour of being dumby; but what he did with himself on Sunday occasioned me some speculation. Never in my life did I see him take up a book, although he sometimes talked of Shakspeare and Milton, and Johnson and Burke, in a manner which proved that he had heard of such things; and as to the newspaper, which he did read, that was generally conned over long before night; besides he never exhibited spectacles, and I have a notion that he could not read newspaper type at night without them. How he could possibly get through the aftercoffee hours on a Sunday puzzled me long. Chance solved the problem. He came to call on us after church, and agreed to dine and sleep at our house. The moment tea was over, without the slightest apology or attempt at conversation, he drew his chair to the fire, set his feet on the fender, and fell fast asleep in the most comfortable and orderly manner possible. It was evidently a weekly habit. Every sense and limb seemed composed to it. Viper looked up in his face, curled himself round on the hearth-rug, and went to sleep too; and Andrews, just as the clock struck twelve, came in to wake him that he might go to bed. It was clearly an invariable custom; a settled thing. His house and grounds were kept in the neatest manner possible. There was something even disagreeable in the excessive nicety, the Dutch preciseness of the shining gravel walks, the smooth shaven turf of the single, he made us promise to visit him du...g the ensuing summer. Alas! long before the summer arrived, our poor friend was dead. He had waited for this living thirty years; he did not enjoy it thirty days. lawn, and the fine-sifted mould of the shrub-| subject of looking out for a wife. Marri beries. A few dead leaves or scattered flowers, even a weed or two, any thing to take away from the artificial toy-like look of the place, would have been an improvement. Mr. Sidney, however, did not think so. He actually caused his gardener to remove those littering plants called roses and gum cistuses. Other flowers fared little better. No sooner were they in bloom, than he pulled them up for fear they should drop. In doors, matters were still worse. The rooms and furniture were very handsome, abounding in the luxurious Turkey carpets, the sofas, easy chairs, and Ottomans, which his habits required; and yet I never in my life saw any house which looked less comfortable. Every thing was so constantly in its place, so provokingly in order, so full of naked nicety, so thoroughly old-bachelorish. No work! no books! no music! no flowers! But for those two things of life, Viper and a sparkling fire, one might have thought the place uninhabited. Once a year, indeed, it gave signs of animation, in the shape of a Christmas party. That was Mr. Sidney's shining time. Nothing could exceed the smiling hospitality of the host, or the lavish profusion of the entertainment. It breathed the very spirit of a welcome, splendidly liberal; and little Viper trisked and bounded, and Andrew's tail vibrated (I was going to say wagged) with cordiality and pleasure. Andrews, on these occasions, laid aside his "customary black" in favour of a blue coat and a white silk court waistcoat, with a light running pattern of embroidery and silver spangles, assumed to do honour to his master and the company. How much he enjoyed the applause which the wines and the cookery elicited from the gentlemen; and how anxiously he would direct the ladies' attention to a MS. collection of riddles, the compilation of some deceased countess, laid on the drawing-room table for their amusement between dinner and tea. Once, I remember, he carried his attention so far as to produce a gone-by toy, called a bandalore, for the recreation of myself and another little girl, admitted by virtue of the Christmas holidays to this annual festival. Poor Andrews! I am convinced that he considered the entertainment of the visiters quite as much his affair as his master's; and certainly they both succeeded. Never did parties pass more pleasantly. On those evenings Mr. Sidney even forgot to find fault at whist. A VILLAGE BEAU. THE finest young man in our village is undoubtedly Joel Brent, half-brother to my Lizzy. They are alike too; as much alike as a grown-up person and a little child of different sexes well can be; alike in a vigorous uprightness of form, light, firm, and compact as possible; alike in the bright, sparkling, triumphant blue eye, the short-curled upper lip, the brown wavy hair, the white forehead and sunburnt cheeks, and, above all, in the singular spirit and gaiety of their countenance and demeanour, the constant expression of life and glee, to which they owe the best and rarest part of their attractiveness. They seem, and they are two of the happiest and merriest creatures that ever trod on the greensward. Really to see Joel walking by the side of his team, (for this enviable mortal, the pride of our village, is by calling a carter), to see him walking, on a fine sunny morning, by the side of his bell-team, the fore-horse decked with ribbons and flowers like a countess on the birth-day, as consciously handsome as his driver, the long whip poised gracefully on his shoulder, his little sister in his hand, and his dog Ranger (a beautiful red and white spaniel At last, towards the end of a very severe winter, during which he had suffered much from repeated colds, the rectory of *** beeame vacant, and our worthy neighbour hastened to take possession. The day before his journey he called on us in the highest spirits, anticipating a renewal of health and youth in this favourite spot, and approaching nearer than I had ever heard him to a jest on the every thing that belongs to Joel is beautiful) frisking about them:-to see this group, and to hear the merry clatter formed by Lizzy's tongue, Joel's whistling, and Ranger's delighted bark, is enough to put an amateur of pleasant sounds and happy faces in good humour for the day. It is a grateful sight in other respects, for Joel is a very picturesque person, just such an one as a painter would select for the foreground of some English landscape, where nature is shown in all her loveliness. His costume is the very perfection of rustic coquetry, of that grace, which all admire and few practise, the grace of adaptation, the beauty of fitness. No one ever saw Joel in that wretched piece of deformity a coat, or that still wretcheder apology for a coat a docktailed jacket. Broad-cloth, the "common stale" of peer and peasant, approaches him not; neither does the poor creature," fustian. His upper garment consists of that prettier jacket without skirts, call it for the more grace a doublet, of dark velveteen, hanging open over his waistcoat, giving a Spanish or an Italian air to his whole appearance, and setting off to great advantage his trim yet manly shape. To this |