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plank, at the risk, almost the certainty, of plunging head foremost into the water. If Mrs. Martha had been asked, on level ground and out of danger, whether she preferred to be soused in her own person, or to break her china jug, she would, most undoubtedly, theoretically have chosen the ducking; but theory and practice are different matters, and following the instinct of self-preservation, she let the dear mug go, and clung to the tree.

As soon as she was perfectly safe she began to lament, in her usual vituperative strain, over her irreparable loss, scolding the tottering plank and the slippery bank, and finally, there being no one else to bear the blame, her own heedless haste, which had cost her the commodity she valued most in the world. Swinging herself round, however, still supported by the tree, she had the satisfaction to perceive that the dear jug was not yet either sunken or broken. It rested most precariously on a tuft of bulrushes towards the centre of the pool, in instant danger of both these calamities, and, indeed, appeared to her to be visibly sinking under its own weight. What could she do? She could never reach it; and whilst she went to summon assistance, the precious porcelain would vanish. What could she do?

Just as she was asking herself this question, she had the satisfaction to hear footsteps in the lane. She called; and a small voice was heard singing, and the little man Moses with his satchel at his back, made his appearance, returning from school. He had not heard her, and she would not call him-not even to preserve her china treasure. Moses, however, saw the dilemma, and pausing only to pull off his coat, plunged into the water, to rescue the sinking cup.

And she kept her word, she provided amply and kindly for Dinah and her daughters; but Moses is her heir, and he lives at the Manor Farm, and is married to the prettiest woman in the county; and Mrs. Martha has betaken herself to the Pond-side, with a temper so much ameliorated, that the good farmer declares the greatest risk his children run is, of being spoilt by aunt Martha :-one in particular, her godson, who has inherited the name and the favour of his father, and is her own especial little Moses.

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.

TOM HOPKINS.

THEY who knew the little town of Cranley some thirty years ago, must needs remember Tom Hopkins, the loudest, if not the greatest man in the place, and one of the most celebrated sportsmen in that sporting neighbourhood, which he had honoured with his residence for a longer time than he still in the prime of life, and as tenacious of his pretensions to youth as a fading beauty-cared to hear tell of. Tom, whose family was none of the most illustrious, his ancestors having been from time immemorial grocers in the town, had had the good luck, before he was out of petticoats, to take the fancy of a rich relation, a grand-aunt, who, captivated as grand-aunts are wont to be, by a happy union of prettiness and mischief, rosy cheeks and naughty tricks, the usual merits of a spoilt child, installed the chubby-faced Pickle into the post of present pet, and future heir, sent him to school at The summer had been wet, and the pool her own expense, and declared her intention was unusually high, and Mrs. Martha, startled to make a gentleman of him in proper time,to perceive that he was almost immediately a prospect which, as her hopeful grand-nephew beyond his depth, called him earnestly and happily conceived the immunities and privivehemently to return. The resolute boy, how-leges of gentility to consist of idleness and ever, accustomed from infancy to dabble like the young water-fowl amidst the sedges and islets of the great pond, was not to be frightened by the puny waters of the Elmin spring. He reached, though at some peril, the tuft of bulrushes brought the jug triumphantly to land-washed it-filled it at the fountainhead, and finally offered it, with his own sweet and gracious smile, to Mrs. Martha. And she -oh! what had she not suffered during the last few moments, whilst the poor orphan her brother George's only boy, was risking his life to preserve for her a paltry bit of earthenware! What had she not felt during those few but long moments! Her woman's heart melted within her; and instead of seizing the precious porcelain, she caught the dripping boy in her arms- -half-smothered him with kisses, and vowed that her home should be his home, and her fortune his fortune.

field-sports, proved sufficiently delightful to reconcile him to the previous formality of learning "small Latin and less Greek," and bore him safely through the forms, with no less reputation than that of being the greatest dunce that ever quitted the school. When that happy time arrived, however, there was some difference of opinion as to his destination, Tom having set his heart on one mode of killing, whilst his grand-aunt had decided on another. "I will be a soldier," cried Tom, already enamoured of the art of gunnery. "You shall be an apothecary," replied aunt Deborah, equally devoted to the draught and the pill. Physic and arms fought a pitched battle, and long and obstinate was the contest; there was even some danger that the dispute might have ended in disinheritance, to the probable benefit of the county hospital, when a discreet friend prudently suggested

the possibility of uniting the two modes of putting people out of the world, and Tom consented to don the apron and sleeves and become un garçon apothicaire, under promise of flourishing at some future period as an army surgeon a promise which, though not kept to the letter, was at least so far realized as to make him a surgeon of militia, and obtain for him the enviable privilege of wearing a red coat, and meddling with fire-arms. These delights, however ecstatic, soon lost their gloss and their novelty; Tom speedily discovered that hunting and shooting were his real vocation; and aunt Deborah happening to die and Ito leave him a comfortable independence, he retired from the service, after one winter spent in country quarters, returned to his native town, built himself a house, set up an establishment, consisting of a couple of hunters, a brace of pointers, a servant lad, and an old woman, and began to make war on the hares, foxes, pheasants, partridges, and other feræ naturæ, under the character of a sportsman, which he filled with eminent ability and success, being universally reckoned one of the boldest riders and best shots in the county.

At the time of which I speak, he was of an age somewhat equivocal; public fame called him forty, whilst he himself stuck obstinately at thirty-two; of a stout active figure, rather 'manly than gentlemanly, and a bold jovial visage, in excellent keeping with his person, distinguished by round bright stupid black eyes, an aquiline nose, a knowing smile, and a general comely vulgarity of aspect. His voice was hoarse and deep, his manner bluff and blunt, and his conversation loud and boisterous. With all these natural impediments to good company, the lowness of his origin recent in their memories, and the flagrant fact of his residence in a country town, staring them in the face, Mr. Tom Hopkins made his way into almost every family of consideration in the neighbourhood. Sportmanship, sheer sportmanship, the qualification that, more than any other, commands the respect of your great English landholder, surmounted every obstacle. There was not a man in the shire hunt who fenced so well, or we it so fast over a country; and every table in the county was open to so eminent a personage.

With the ladies, he made his way by different qualities; in the first place he was a character, an oddity; and the audacity of his vulgarity was tolerated, where a man only half as boisterous would have been scouted; then he was gallant in his way, affected, perhaps felt. a great devotion to the sex, and they were half amused, half pleased, with the rough flattery which seemed, and probably was, so sincere. Then they liked, as all women like, his sturdiness of character, his boldness, his stanchness, and his zeal. He won Lady Frances's heart by canvassing for her husband in a contested election, during which

he performed more riding, drinking, and roaring, told more lies and made more noise than any ten of the fee'd agents; he achieved the Countess's good graces by restoring her fat asthmatic lap-dog to health, appetite, and activity. N. B. As Mr. Thomas Hopkins took Chloe home to Cranley to be nursed, it is likely that the Abernethy system may fairly claim the merit of that cure;-and he even made a favourable impression on a young Marchioness, by riding to London, above seventy miles, in order to match a shade of netting silk, thereby winning a considerable wager against time of the Marquis. In short, Tom Hopkins was so general a favourite with the female world, that, but for three or four flat refusals, consequent on as many very presumptuous offers, he would certainly have fallen into the mistake of thinking he might marry whom he would. As it was, he kept his own counsel, only betraying his soreness by a transient avoidance of ladies' company, and a proneness to descant at the Hunt dinners on the comforts of a single state, and the manifold evils of matrimony.

His house was an ugly brick dwelling of his own erection, situate in the principal street of Cranley, and adorned with a green door and a brass knocker, giving entrance into a stone passage, which, there being no other way to the stab e, served both for himself, and that very dear part of himself, his horses, whose dwelling was certainly far more commodious than their master's. His accommodations were simple enough. The dining-parlour, which might pass for his only sitting-room,for the little dark den which he called his drawing-room was not entered three times a year, the dining-parlour was a small square room, coloured pea-green with a gold moulding, adorned with a series of four prints on shooting, and four on hunting, together with two or three portraits of eminent racers, riders, hunters, and grooms. Guns and fishing-rods were suspended over the mantel-piece; powder-horns, shot-belts, and game-bags, scattered about; a choice collection of flies for angling lay in one corner, whips and bridles in another, and a pile of books and papers,-Colonel Thornton's Tour, Daniel's Rural Sports, and a heap of Racing Calendars, occupied a third; Ponto and Carlo lay basking on the hearthrug, and a famous little cocking spaniel, Flora by name, a conscious favourite, was generally stretched in state on an arm-chair.

Here, except when the owner was absent on a sporting expedition, which, between fishing, shooting, hunting, and racing, did, it must be confessed, happen pretty often; here his friends were sure to find a hearty welcome, a good beef-steak (his old housekeeper was famous for cookery), and as much excellent port and super-excellent Madeira (Tom, like most of his school, eschewed claret and other thin potations) as their host could prevail on

them to swallow. Many a good fellow hath "heard the chimes at midnight" in this little room. Here Tom sate in his glory, telling interminable stories of his own exploits, and those of his dogs and horses; stories in every sense of the word, but yet as innocent as falsehoods well can be-in the first place, because they were always lies of vanity, not lies of malice, and could do harm to no creature upon earth; in the second, because the orator being somewhat lengthy and prosy, his hearers were apt to be troubled with "the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking," and seldom knew what he was talking about. Moreover, having told fibs of this sort all his life, I don't think he could help it; I don't even believe that he knew when he did it, or that he could, to save his life, have separated the true from the false, in any one of his legends. He was incurable. It did not even hurt his conscience to be found out.

Such was Tom Hopkins; and such, allowing for the difference of thirty years, Tom Hopkins is still. Some changes are however observable in that gallant sportsman, such changes as thirty years are wont to bring. He sits somewhat heavier in the saddle, and mounts somewhat seldomer,-has well-nigh given up fishing and shooting,-has exchanged fox-hunting for coursing,-sold his hunters and purchased a staid roadster,-keeps a brace of greyhounds, of whose pedigree he vaunts much, belongs to two coursing meetings, and swears every year that his dog was cheated out of the cup.

This is his winter amusement. In the summer he diverts himself like other idle gentlemen; cons over the Sporting Magazine, and the newspaper of the day; lounges to the inn to see the coaches change horses, and observes to a second whether the Regulator or the Defiance keeps time best; or stands sentinel in the garden, firing, from time to time, to keep the sparrows from the cherry trees. On wet days he is often seized with a fancy for mending and altering, and walks about the house, with a hammer sticking out of his pocket, doing no good, or a carpenter at his heels doing harm; sometimes dozes in his easy chair, and sometimes complains of a twinge of the gout. He has nearly given up country visiting, but is a great man at the Cranley Club, where he tells longer stories than ever of the chases, the hounds, and the hunters of his youth; of the great contested election; of matchless belles, now, alas! no more, and lords who have not left their fellow; rails at the degeneracy of the times, the decline of beauty, the increase of dandyism, the adulteration of port wine, and the decrease of good fellowship; gets half tipsy, and finally staggers home, escorted by his maid Dorothy, a rosy-cheeked damsel, of whose handiness and skill in cookery (his old house-keeper having long been dead,) he boasts almost as

much as of the breed of his greyhounds, and whom the President of the Cranley Club has betted with his Vice, "that old Tom Hopkins," (so he irreverently calls him), "with all his talk of Duchesses and Countesses, will marry before the year is out;" and truly, I think so too.

LOUISA.

I HAVE said, in talking of my fair friend, Little Miss Wren -the Baroness Blankenhausen, I beg her pardon, how one forgets these new-married ladies' new titles !-I have said that this was a year fruitful in white gloves, silver favours and bride-cake; and since that event, weddings and tidings of weddings have poured in faster than ever. The last of these conjunctions is to me by far the most astonishing-so astonishing that although assisting at the ceremony I can hardly believe that it has taken place; but am still experiencing the same sort of surprise, that one feels at the death of an invalid of ten years' standing, or the termination of a twenty years' chancery suit.

It was on Monday last that I had the double pleasure of attending the nuptials of an old friend, and of giving in my resignation of the post of confidante, which I had filled with great credit and honour for twenty years and upwards. A married woman no longer needs the sympathy and consolation of a listening and pitying love-friend. Her story, according to all the laws of romance, is fairly over. So is my occupation. I shall miss it at first, just as one living in a church-yard would miss an entire cessation of those bells, which yet, from habit, he scarcely heard. I shall miss poor Louisa's sighs and blushes, written or spoken, especially when the post comes in, and she will miss me, perhaps, the most of the two; for I cannot help thinking that by the time the honey-moon is over, the necessity for a discreet confidante may be as pressing as ever. I cannot disguise from myself, that a damsel who has been used to fall in love with a new object at the end of every two or three months for the last twenty years, more or less, may, from mere habit, and without the slightest intentional infraction of the nuptial vow, fairly forget that she is married, and relapse into her old custom; more espe cially as her husband appears to be the only young man she has ever known with whom she has never even fancied herself in love.

Louisa L. and myself were old schoolfellows. Her father is a West-Indian planter of some property, who, having lost many children in the pestiferous climate of Barbadoes, did not choose to carry thither his only remaining daughter, and left her at school dur

ing a long residence on his estate, not as a parlour-boarder but as a common pupil. She was a fine-looking girl, with a tall showy figure, and a face amazingly like what one sees in those old family portraits, which bear so great a resemblance to each other, whatever they might do to the originals. Like them, our heroine was distinguished by regular features, a high marrow forehead, black sleepy eyes, long dark hair, a clear complexion, and a general languishing composure of aspect.

Now this sounds like the description of a beautiful woman as well as of a beautiful picture and so it would be, only that, unluckily, whilst content that the portrait should keep one look and one expression, we are apt to expect the real woman to vary occasionally, and are so unreasonable as to be disappointed when we find her countenance, however handsome (for the handsomer it is, the more we expect from it), fixed in the same mould of comely silliness from year's end to year's end. In such a case, almost any change would be felt as a relief, and a little ugliness would tell exceedingly.

Her conversation was quite in keeping with her style of person; much of the sort (making due allowance for the interval of a century) that one might expect from Sir Peter Lely's portrait of one's great-grandmother seated on a bank, attired in a robe of blue satin, with a crook in her hand, a rose in her bosom, and two or three sheep at her feet.

Simile apart, Louisa was a thoroughly well-meaning young woman, with little wit, and much good-nature, with a mind no more adapted to contain knowledge than a sieve to hold water; and a capacity of unlearning, a faculty of forgetting, most happily suited to the double and triple course of instruction which her father's protracted absence doomed her to undergo. She had been in the first class for five years to my certain knowledge; there I found her and there I left her, going over the same ground with each successive set, and regularly overtaken and outstripped by every girl of common talent. The only thing in which she ever made any real proficiency was music; by dint of incredible application she sang tolerably, played well on the piano, and better on the harp. But she had no genuine love even for that; and began to weary, as well she might, of her incessant practice, and her interminable education. The chief effect of this natural weariness was a strong desire to be married, the only probable mode of release that occurred to her; for of her father's return she and every one had begun to despair. How to carry this wish into effect, perplexed her not a little. If she had been blessed with a manœuvring mamma, indeed, the business might soon have been done. But poor Louisa was not so lucky. She had only an old bachelor uncle, and two maiden

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aunts, who, quite content to see to her comforts in a kind, quiet way; to have her at home in the holidays; to keep her well dressed, and well supplied with fruit and pocket-money, continued to think of her as a mere school-girl, and never dreamed of the grand object by which her whole soul was engrossed. So that the gentle damsel, left entirely to the resources of her own genius, could devise no better plan than to fix her own thoughts and attention, fall in love, as she called and perhaps thought it, with every man of suitable station who happened to fall in her way. The number of these successive, or alternate, or simultaneous preferences-for often she had two beaux, who were laid aside and taken up, in a sort of see-saw, as either happened to cross her path; and sometimes she had literally two at once-was really astonishing. So was her impartiality. Rich or poor, old or young, from seventeen to seventy, nothing came amiss. Equally amazing was the exceedingly small encouragement upon which her fancy could work; to dance with her, to sit next her at dinner, to ask her to play, one visit, one compliment, a look, a word, or half a word, was enough to send her sighing through the house, singing tender airs, and reading novels and love-ditties. The celebrated ballad in which Cowley gives a list of his mistresses- the "Chronicle," he calls it was but a type of the bead-roll of names that might have been strung up from her fancies. The common duration of a fit was about a month or six weeks, sometimes more, sometimes less, as one love-wedge drove out another; but generally the decline and fall' of these attachments (I believe that is the phrase), began at the month's end.

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It was astonishing how well these little dramas were gotten up: any body not in the secret would have thought her really a tender inamorata, she had so many pretty sentimentalities, would wear nothing but the favourite's favourite colour, or sigh out her soul over his favourite song, or hoard his notes or visiting tickets in her bosom. One of her vagaries cost me a bad cold. The reigning swain happened to be a German count, who, talking somewhat fantastically of the stars, expressed a sort of superstitious devotion to the beautiful constellation Orion; he could not sleep, he said, till he had gazed on it. Now, our luckless damsel took this for a sort of covert assignation, a tender rendezvous of looks and thoughts, like the famous story of the two lovers in the Spectator; and the sky prospect from her apartment being rather limited, she used, to my unspeakable annoyance, to come star-gazing to mine. This accès, being encouraged by more attention than usual on the part of the gentleman or rather she being unused to foreign manners, and mistaking the courtesy to a fair lady for a particular devotion,-lasted three whole months. Of course

she fell into other mistakes besides the general one of fancying all men in love with her. One winter, for instance, she fancied that a sickly gentleman, who used to sun himself on the pavement on our side of the square, walked there to listen to her music; so she obligingly moved her harp close to an open window (in December! N. B. she caught as bad a cold by these noon-day serenades, as ever her midnight assignations with the belted Orion gave me,) and played and sang during the whole time of his promenade. A little while after we discovered that the poor gentleman was deaf.

Nor were her own mistakes, though they were bad enough, the worst she had to encounter. A propensity so ridiculous could not escape undetected amongst such a tribe of tricksy and mischievous spirits; nor could all the real regard attracted by the fair Louisa's many good qualities save her from the malpractices of these little mockers. It was such fun to set her whirligig heart a-spinning, to give her a fresh object-sometimes a venerable grandfather, sometimes a school-boy brother, sometimes a married cousin―any lover would answer her purpose, and the more absurd or impossible, the better for ours.

meaning affectionate words, I left off writing at all, perhaps with the lurking hope that she would follow my example. No such thing. The vent was necessary- I was the safetyvalve to her heart, by which dangerous explosions were prevented. On she wrote-and oh such letters! crossed and recrossed, and in such a hand! so pretty and so unreadable! Straight and far apart, with long tails meeting each other, and the shorter letters all alike, all m's and n's.* In vain did I remonstrate against this fashionable but barbarous calligraphy, above all against the iniquitous checquer work; on she went from bad to worse, till at last, to my great comfort, her letters became altogether illegible, and my conscience was absolved from the necessity of even trying to read them. A frank made no difference; she went on with her double crossing, only there was double the quantity. Any thing like a regular perusal of these precious epistles was entirely out of the question; and yet I used to get at the meaning of most of them in the process of folding and unfolding, just as one sometimes catches the substance of an unreadable book by the mere act of cutting open the leaves. I knew her so well, that I could trace by a catch-word the progress of her history, and the particular object of her present regard-how she was herself in love with a lord, and how accusing a presumptuous linen-draper of being enamoured of her; how she had a young baronet at her feet, and how she could talk of nothing but an itinerant musician. Twice had she called on me, to fulfil an old promise of attending her to the altar; and once (I was young and silly then myself,) once I had been so far taken in as actually to prepare a wedding-suit. Of course, when the final summons came, I was utterly incredulous. It was something like the fable of the shepherd's boy and the wolf; not a soul believed her, till the news arrived in a regular authentic document- a letter from her father

I will, however, do myself the justice to say, that partly from compassion, and partly from vanity at being elected to the post of confidante, I was not by many degrees so guilty as many of my compeers. To be sure one Valentine, a piece of original poetry, with about as much sense and meaning as the famous love-song by a person of quality, and a few flowery billets to match, purporting to come from the same quarter,-that Valentine! I must plead guilty to that Valentine-but that was a venial offence, and besides she never found it out. So when I left the school, and even when six months after her father unexpectedly returned and took her to reside with him in a country town, I still continued the favoured depository of her secrets and her a worthy matter-of-fact man, whom poor sighs.

We lived in distant counties, and met so seldom, that our intercourse was almost entirely epistolary. Intercourse did I say? My share of the correspondence, or of the dialogue, was little better than what a confidante on the French stage sustains with the belle princesse, from whom she is obliged to hear a hundred times told tale. I was a mere woman of straw -a thing to direct to. She never cared for answers, luckily for me; for at first whilst my young civility and conscientious sense of the duties of a polite letter-writer instigated me to reply point by point to her epistles, such blunders used to ensue as are sometimes produced in a game of cross purposes-a perpetual jostling of hopes and fears; condolence out of season; congratulation mistimed; praise misapplied; eternal confusion; never-ending mistakes. So, farther than half-a-dozen un

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Louisa's vagaries had actually kept in purgatory,-to mine, who also held the fair damsel for mad. Mr. S. mentioned his intended sonin-law as belonging to the medical profession; and on looking back to Louisa's letters, which under the new stimulus of curiosity, as to the approaching denouement, we contrived to decipher, we discovered that for upwards of two months Louisa had been deeply smitten with a young physician newly arrived at L———: whom she called by the name of Henry, and of whose fine tall person, as well as his dark and manly beauty she gave a most flaming description. This, of course, was the gentleman. I hastened to repair my fault and prepare my dresses; wrote a letter of congratula-;

*Of all the varieties of bad writing, this, which looks at first sight quite plain, whilst to decipher it would puzzle an Edipus, is the most pro voking.

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