healthy, ruddy, square face, all alive with intelligence and good-humour. There was a larking jest in his eye, and a smile about the corners of his firmly-closed lips, that gave assurance of good-fellowship. His voice was loud enough to have hailed a ship at sea, without the assistance of a speaking-trumpet, wonderfully rich and round in its tones, and harmonizing admirably with his bluff, jovial visage. He wore his dark shining hair combed straight over his forehead, and had a trick, when particularly merry, of stroking it down with his hand. The moment his right hand approached his head, out flew a jest. Besides his own great farm, the business of which seemed to go on like machinery, always regular, prosperous, and unfailing-besides this and two or three constant stewardships, and a perpetual succession of arbitrations, in which, such was the influence of his acuteness, his temper, and his sturdy justice, that he was often named by both parties, and left to decide alone,—in addition to these occupations, he was a sort of standing overseer and churchwarden; he ruled his own hamlet like a despotic monarch, and took a prime minister's share in the government of the large parish to which it was attached; and one of the gentlemen, whose estates he managed, being the independent member for an independent borough, he had every now and then a contested election on his shoulders. Even that did not discompose him. He had always leisure to receive his friends at home, or to visit them abroad; to take journeys to London, or make excursions to the sea-side; was as punctual in pleasure as in business, and thought being happy and making happy as much the purpose of his life as getting rich. His great amusement was coursing. He kept several brace of capital greyhounds, so high-blooded, that I remember when five of them were confined in five different kennels on account of their ferocity. The greatest of living painters once called a greyhound, "the line of beauty in perpetual motion." Our friend's large dogs were a fine illustration of this remark. His old dog, Hector, for instance, for which he refused a hundred guineas, what a superb dog was Hector!. a model of grace and symmetry, necked and crested like an Arabian, and bearing himself with a stateliness and gallantry that showed some "conscience of his worth." He was the largest dog I ever saw; but so finely proportioned, that the most determined faultfinder could call him neither too long nor too heavy. There was not an inch too much of him. His colour was the purest white, entirely unspotted, except that his head was very regularly and richly marked with black. Hector was certainly a perfect beauty. But the little bitches, on which his master piqued himself still more, were not, in my poor judgment, so admirable. They were pretty little round, graceful things, sleek and glossy, and for the most part milk-white, with the smallest heads, and the most dove-like eyes that were ever seen. There was a peculiar sort of innocent beauty about them, like that of a roly-poly child. They were as gentle as lambs too: all the evil spirit of the family evaporated in the gentlemen. But, to my thinking, these pretty creatures were fitter for the parlour than the field. They were strong, certainly, excellently loined, cat-footed, and chested like a war-horse; but there was a want of length about them -a want of room, as the coursers say; something a little, a very little inclining to the clumsy; a dumpiness, a pointer-look. They went off like an arrow from the bow; for the first hundred yards nothing could stand against them; then they began to flag, to find their weight too much for their speed, and to lose ground from the shortness of the stroke. Up-hill, however, they were capital. There their compactness told. They turned with the hare, and lost neither wind nor way in the sharpest ascent. I shall never forget one single-handed course of our good friend's favourite little bitch Helen, on W. hill. All the coursers were in the valley below, looking up to the hill-side as on a moving picture. I suppose she turned the hare twenty times on a piece of greensward not much bigger than an acre, and as steep as the roof of a house. It was an old hare, a famous hare, one that had baffled half the dogs in the county; but she killed him; and then, though almost as large as herself, took it up in her mouth, brought it to her master, and laid it down at his feet. Oh how pleased he was! and what a pleasure it was to see his triumph! He did not always find W. hill so fortunate. It is a high steep hill, of a conical shape, encircled by a mountain road winding up to the summit like a corkscrew, -a deep road dug out of the chalk, and fenced by high mounds on either side. The hares always make for this hollow way, as it is called, because it is too wide for a leap, and the dogs lose much time in mounting and descending the sharp acclivities. Very eager dogs, however, will sometimes dare the leap, and two of our good friend's favourite greyhounds perished in the attempt in two following years. They were found dead in the hollow way. After this he took a dislike to distant coursing meetings, and sported chiefly on his own beautiful farm. His wife was like her husband, with a difference, as they say in heraldry. Like him in looks, only thinner and paler; like him in voice and phrase, only not so loud; like him in merriment and good-humour; like him in her talent of welcoming and making happy, and being kind; like him in cherishing an abundance of pets, and in getting through with marvellous facility an astounding quantity of business and pleasure. Perhaps the quality great taste in every way, and seem often to select for beauty as much as for flavour. They have a better eye for colour than the florist. The butterfly is also a dilettante. Rover though he be, he generally prefers the blossoms that become him best. What a pretty picture it is, in a sunshiny autumn day, to see a bright spotted butterfly, made up of gold and purple and splendid brown, swinging on the rich flower of the china aster! in which they resembled each other most common flowers for their use, and literally completely, was the happy ease and serenity" redolent of sweets." Bees are insects of of behaviour, so seldom found amongst people of the middle rank, who have usually a best manner and a worst, and whose best (that is, the studied, the company manner) is so very much the worst. She was frankness itself; entirely free from prickly defiance, or bristling self-love. She never took offence or gave it; never thought of herself or of what others would think of her; had never been afflicted with the besetting sins of her station, a dread of the vulgar, or an aspiration after the genteel. Those "words of fear" had never disturbed her delightful heartiness. Her pets were her cows, her poultry, her bees, and her flowers; chiefly her poultry, almost as numerous as the becs, and as various as the flowers. The farm-yard swarmed with peacocks, turkeys, geese, tame and wild-ducks, fowls, guinea-hens, and pigeons; besides a brood or two of favourite bantams in the green court before the door, with a little ridiculous strutter of a cock at their head, who imitated the magnificent demeanour of the great Tom of the barn-yard, just as Tom in his turn copied the fierce bearing of that warlike and terrible biped the he-turkey. I am the least in the world afraid of a turkey-cock, and used to steer clear of the turkery as often as I could. Commend me to the peaceable vanity of that jewel of a bird the peacock, sweeping his gorgeous tail along the grass, or dropping it gracefully from some low-boughed tree, whilst he turns round his crested head with the air of a birth-day belle, to see who admires him. What a glorious creature it is! How thoroughly content with himself and with all the world! Next to her poultry our good farmer's wife loved her flower-garden; and indeed it was of the very first water, the only thing about the place that was fine. She was a real genuine florist; valued pinks, tulips, and auriculas, for certain qualities of shape and colour, with which beauty had nothing to do; preferred black ranunculuses, and gave into all those obliquities of a tripled refined taste by which the professed florist contrives to keep pace with the vagaries of the bibliomaniac. Of all odd fashions, that of dark, gloomy, dingy flowers, appears to me the oddest. Your true connoisseur now, shall prefer a deep puce hollyhock, to the gay pink blossoms which cluster around that splendid plant like a pyramid of roses. So did she. The nomenclature of her garden was more distressing still. One is never thoroughly sociable with flowers till they are naturalized as it were, christened, provided with decent, homely, well-wearing English names. Now her plants had all sorts of heathenish appellations, which,-no offence to her learning,-always sounded wrong. I liked the bees' garden best; the plot of ground immediately round their hives, filled with To come back to our farm. Within doors every thing went as well as without. There were no fine misses sitting before the piano, and mixing the alloy of their new-fangled tinsel with the old sterling metal; nothing but an only son excellently brought up, a fair slim youth, whose extraordinary and somewhat pensive elegance of mind and manner was thrown into fine relief by his father's loud hilarity, and harmonized delightfully with the smiling kindness of his mother. His Spensers and Thomsons, too, looked well amongst the hyacinths and geraniums that filled the windows of the little snug room in which they usually sate; a sort of afterthought, built at an angle from the house, and looking into the farm-yard. It was closely packed with favourite arm-chairs, favourite sofas, favourite tables, and a side-board decorated with the prize-cups and collars of the greyhounds, and generally loaded with substantial work-baskets, jars of flowers, great pyramids of home-made cakes, and sparkling bottles of gooseberry-wine, famous all over the country. The walls were covered with portraits of half a dozen greyhounds, a brace of spaniels, as large as life, an old pony, and the master and mistress of the house in halflength. She as unlike as possible, prim, mincing, delicate, in lace and satin; he so staringly and ridiculously like, that when the picture fixed its good-humoured eyes upon you as you entered the room, you were almost tempted to say-how d'ye do? - Alas! the portraits are now gone, and the originals. Death and distance have despoiled that pleasant home. The garden has lost its smiling mistress; the greyhounds their kind master; and new people, new manners, and new cares, have taken possession of the old abode of peace and plenty-the great farm-house. LUCY. ABOUT a twelvemonth ago we had the misfortune to lose a very faithful and favourite female servant; one who has spoiled us for all others. Nobody can expect to meet with two Lucies. We all loved Lucy-poor Lucy! She did not die-she only married; but we were so sorry to part with her, that her wed ding, which was kept at our house, was almost | own sunshine into the shady places, and would as tragical as a funeral; and from pure regret hope and doubt as long as either was possible. and affection we sum up her merits, and be- Her fertility of intelligence was wonderful; moan our loss, just as if she had really de- and so early! Her news had always the bloom parted this life. on it; there was no being beforehand with Lucy. It was a little mortifying when one came prepared with something very recent and surprising, something that should have made her start with astonishment, to find her fully acquainted with the story, and able to furnish you with twenty particulars that you never heard of. But this evil had its peculiar compensation. By Lucy's aid I passed with every body, but Lucy herself, for a woman of great information, an excellent authority, an undoubted reference in all matters of gossipry. Now I 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. Lucy's praise is a most fertile theme: she united the pleasant and amusing qualities of a French soubrette, with the solid excellence of an English woman of the old school, and was good by contraries. In the first place, she was exceedingly agreeable to look at; remarkably pretty. She lived in our family eleven years; but, having come to us very young, was still under thirty, just in full bloom, and a very brilliant bloom it was. Her figure was rather tall, and rather large, with delicate hands and feet, and a remarkable ease and vigour in her motions: I never saw any woman walk so fast or so well. Her face was round and dimpled, with sparkling grey eyes, black eye-brows and eye-lashes, a profusion of dark hair, very red lips, very white teeth, and a complexion that entirely took away the look of vulgarity which the breadth and flatness of her face might otherwise have given. Such a complexion, so pure, so finely grained, so healthily fair, with such a sweet rosiness, brightening and varying like her dancing eyes whenever she spoke or smiled! When silent, she was almost pale; but, to confess the truth, she was not often silent. Lucy liked talking, and every body liked to hear her talk. There is always great freshness and originality in an uneducated and quick-witted person, who surprises one continually by unsuspected knowledge or amusing ignorance; and Lucy had a real talent for conversation. Her light and pleasant temper, her cleverness, her universal kindness, and the admirable address, or rather the excellent feeling, with which she contrived to unite the most perfect respect with the most cordial and affectionate interest, gave a singular charm to her prattle. No confidence or indulgence and she was well tried with both ever made her forget herself for a moment. All our friends used to loiter at the door or in the hall to speak to Lucy, and they miss her, and ask for her, as if she were really one of the family.-She was not less liked by her equals. Her constant simplicity and rightmindedness kept her always in her place with them as with us; and her gaiety and good humour made her a most welcome visiter in every shop and cottage round. She had another qualification for village society-she was an incomparable gossip, had a rare genius for picking up news, and great liberality in its diffusion. Births, deaths, marriages, casualties, quarrels, battles, scandal-nothing came amiss to her. She could have furnished a weekly paper from her own stores of facts, without once resorting for assistance to the courts of law or the two houses of parliament. She was a very charitable reporter too; threw her 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 of 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 Dennison." On her inquiring the reason, we showed her "Old Mortality," and asked if she could not guess. "Dear me," said she, "why Jenny Dennison had only two!" Amongst Lucy's twenty 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 amusement and convenience 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, ho 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. 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 nearly 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 eyethat unlucky one eye!-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 honey-suckles, where" the air smelt wooingly." It followed of course that he should make love to Lucy, and that Lucy should listen. All was speed- I hope that her choice has been fortunate; ily settled; as soon as he should be established it is certainly very different from what we all in a good business, which, from his incom- expected. The happy man had been a neighparable talent at cutting out, nobody could bour, (not on the side of the acacia-trees,) and doubt, they were to be married. But they on his removal to a greater distance the marhad not calculated on the perversity of coun- riage took place. Poor dear Lucy! her spouse try taste; he was too good a workman; his is the greatest possible contrast to herself; suits fitted over well; his employers missed ten years younger at the very least; wellcertain accustomed awkwardnesses and re- looking, but with no expression good or bad dundancies which passed for beauties; be--I don't think he could smile, if he would— sides, the stiffness and tightness which distinguished the new coat of the ancien regime, were wanting in the make of this daring innovator. 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 clod-hoppers 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 memory, and above all, in the distaste she showed to new conquests. She paid her faithless suitor the compliment of reinaining loverless for three weary months; and when she relented a little, she admitted no fresh adorer, nothing but an old hangeron; one not quite discarded during the tailor's 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 Fallstaff 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 phrases, such choice words and long words, and fine words and hard words! He speaks by the book,-the spelling book, and is civil after the fashion of the Polite Letter-Writer. He is so entirely without tact, that he does not in the least understand the impression produced by his wife's delightful manners, and interrupts her perpetually to speechify and apologise, and explain and amend. He is fond of her, nevertheless, in his own cold, slow way, and proud of her, and grateful to her friends, and a very good kind of young man altogether; only that I cannot quite forgive him for taking Lucy away in the first place, and making her a school-mistress in the second. She a school-mistress, a keeper of silence, a maintainer of discipline, a scold at the dear old place? Poor thing, I thought of her all the time that I was working them! Don't you like the fir-cones?"After this, I looked at the landscape almost as lovingly as Lucy herself. er, a punisher! Ah! she would rather be information; I should never have guessed that scolded herself; it would be a far lighter pun- there was any difference, except in colour, beishment. Lucy likes her vocation as little as tween the man and the woman, the dog and I do. She has not the natural love of chil- the cat; they were in form, height, and size, dren, which would reconcile her to the evils alike to a thread; the man grey, the woman they cause; and she has a real passion for pink, his attendant white, and her's black. cleanliness, a fiery spirit of dispatch, which Next to these figures, on either side, rose two cannot endure the dust and litter created by fir-trees from two red flower-pots, nice little the little troop on the one hand, or their tor- round bushes of a bright green intermixed menting slowness and stupidity on the other. with brown stitches, which Lucy explained, She was the quickest and neatest of work-not_to_me.—“Don't you see the fir-cones, women, piqued herself on completing a shirt Sir? Don't you remember how fond she used or a gown sooner and better than seemed pos- to be of picking them up in her little basket sible, and was scandalized at finding such talents degraded to the ignoble occupations of tacking a quarter of a yard of hemming for one, pinning half a seam for another, picking out the crooked stitching of a third, and working over the weak irregular burst-out buttonhole of a fourth. When she first went to S, she was strongly tempted to do all the work herself. "The children would have liked it," said she, "and really I don't think the mothers would have objected; they care for nothing but marking. There are seven girls now in the school working samplers to be framed. Such a waste of silk, and time, and trouble! I said to Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Smith said to me"-Then she recounted the whole battle of the samplers, and her defeat; and then she sent for one which, in spite of her declaration that her girls never finished any thing, was quite completed (probably with a good deal of her assistance), and of which, notwithstanding her rational objection to its uselessness, Lucy was not a little proud. She held it up with great delight, pointed out all the beauties, selected her own favourite parts, especially a certain square rose-bud, and the landscape at the bottom; and finally pinned it against the wall, to show the effect it would have when framed. Really, that sampler was a superb thing in its way. First came a plain pink border; then a green border, zig-zag; then a crimson, wavy; then a brown, of a different and more complicated zig-zag; then the alphabet, great and small, in every colour of the rainbow, followed by a row of figures, flanked on one side by a flower, name unknown, tulip, poppy, lily,-something orange or scarlet, or orange-scarlet; on the other by the famous rose-bud; the divers sentences, religious and moral;-Lucy was quite provoked with me for not being able to read them: I dare say she thought in her heart that I was as stupid as any of her scholars; but Lucy's pleasure is in her house; mine is in never was MS. so illegible, not even my own, its situation. The common on which it stands as the print work of that sampler-then, last is one of a series of heathy hills, or rather a and finest, the landscape, in all its glory. It high table-land, pierced in one part by a occupied the whole narrow line at the bottom, ravine of marshy ground, filled with alder and was composed with great regularity. In the centre was a house of a bright scarlet, with yellow windows, a green door, and a blue roof: on one side, a man with a dog; on the other, a woman with a cat-this is Lucy's With all her dislike to keeping school, the dear Lucy seems happy. In addition to the merciful spirit of conformity, which shapes the mind to the situation, whatever that may be, she has many sources of vanity and comfort-her house above all. It is a very respectable dwelling, finely placed on the edge of a large common, close to a high-road, with a pretty flower-court before it, shaded by four horse-chestnuts cut into arches, a sashed window on either side of the door, and on the door a brass knocker, which being securely nailed down, serves as a quiet peaceable handle for all goers, instead of the importunate and noisy use for which it was designed. Jutting out at one end of the court is a small stable; retiring back at the other, a large school-room; and behind, a yard for children, pigs, and poultry, a garden, and an arbour. The inside is full of comfort; miraculously clean and orderly for a village school, and with a little touch of very allowable finery in the gay window-curtains, the cupboard full of pretty china, the handsome chairs, the bright mahogany table, the shining tea-urn, and brilliant tea-tray, that decorate the parlour. What a pleasure it is to see Lucy presiding in that parlour, in all the glory of her honest affection and her warm hospitality, making tea for the three guests whom she loves best in the world, vaunting with courteous pride her home-made bread and her fresh butter, yet thinking nothing good enough for the occasion; smiling and glowing, and looking the very image of beautiful happiness. — Such a moment almost consoles us for losing her. bushes growing larger and larger as the valley widens, and at last mixing with the fine old oaks of the forest of P. Nothing can be more delightful than to sit on the steep brow of the hill, amongst the fragrant heath |