honest and true; but strength was the distin- | in leading-strings, all the privileges of a nurse guishing characteristic of the one man, and and gouvernante, and still called him to acweakness of the other. Peter, much younger count for his savings and spendings, his comPoor than his friend and neighbour, was pale and ings and goings, much as she used to do fair, and slender and delicate, with very light when he was an urchin in short coats. Peter never dreamt of rebellion; he listened hair, very light eyes, a shy timid manner, a small voice, and a general helplessness of and he endured; and every year as it passed over their heads seemed to increase her power "Poor fellow !" was the internal exaspect. clamation, the unspoken thought of every body and his submission. The uncivil world, althat conversed with him; there was something ways too apt to attribute any faults of temper so pitiful in his look and accent: and yet Pe- in an old maid to the fact of her old-maidism, ter was one of the richest men in Belford, (whereas there really are some single women having inherited the hoards of three or four who are not more ill-humoured than their miserly uncles, and succeeded to the well-ac- married neighbours,) used to attribute this customed poultry-shop in the Butts, a high acidity towards poor Peter, of which, under narrow tenement, literally stuffed with geese, all her guarded upper manner, they caught ducks, chickens, pigeons, rabbits, and game occasional glimpses, to her maiden condition. of all sorts, which lined the door and windows, I, for my part, believe in the converse reason. and dangled from the ceiling, and lay ranged I hold that, which seemed to them the effect upon the counter in every possible state, dead of her single state, to have been, in reality, And nobody who had hapor alive, plucked or unplucked, crowding the its main cause. dark, old-fashioned-shop, and forming the pened to observe the change in Miss Judith strongest possible contrast to the wide ample Jenkins' face, at no time over-beautiful, when, repository next door, spacious as a market, from the silent, modest, curtsying, shopwhere Stephen's calves, and sheep, and oxen, woman-like civility with which she had been in their several forms of veal, and beef, and receiving an order for a fine turkey poult, a mutton, hung in whole carcasses from the sort of butter won't melt in her mouth " exwalls, or adorned in separate joints the open pression was turned at once into a "cheese windows, or filled huge trays, or lay scatter- won't choke her" look and voice as she deed on mighty blocks, or swung in enormous livered the order to her unlucky brother, could scales, strong enough to have weighed Stephen be much astonished that any of the race of Lane himself in the balance. Even that stu- bachelors should shrink from the danger of pendous flesh-bazaar did not give greater or encountering such a look in his own person. truer assurance of affluence than the high, Add to this, that the damsel had no worldly narrow, crowded menagerie of dead fowl goods and chattels, except what she might have saved in Peter's house, and, to do her next door. justice, she was, I believe, a strictly honest woman; that the red hair was accompanied by red eye-brows and red eye-lashes, and eyes that, especially when talking to Peter, almost seemed red too; that her face was unusually freckled; and that, from her exceeding meagreness, her very fairness (if mere whiteness had been called such) told against her by giving the look of bones starting through the skin; and it will be admitted that there was no immediate chance of the unfortunate poulterer, getting rid, by the pleasant and safe means called matrimony, of an encumbrance under which he groaned and bent, like Sindbad the Sailor, when bestridden by that he-tormentor the Old Man of the Sea.

-was

Yet still was Peter justly called "Poor fellow!" In the first place, because he was, for a man, far over-gentle, much too like the inhabitants of his own feathery den,not only "pigeon-livered and lacked gall," but was actually chicken-hearted; in the next, because he was, so to say, chickenpecked, and, although a stranger to the comforts of matrimony, was comfortably under petticoat government, being completely domineered over by a maiden sister.

Miss Judith Jenkins was a single woman of an uncertain age, lean, skinny, red-haired, exceedingly prim and upright, slow and formal in her manner, and, to all but Peter, remarkably smooth-spoken. To him her accent was invariably sharp, and sour, and peevish, and contradictory. She lectured him when at home, and rated him for going abroad. The very way in which she called him, though the poor man flew to obey her summons, the method after which she pronounced the innocent dissyllable "Peter," was a sort of taking to task. Having been his elder sister, (although nothing now was less palatable to her than any allusion to her right of primogeniture,) and his mother having died whilst he was an infant, she had been accustomed to exercise over him, from the time that he was

Thus circumstanced, Peter's only refuge and consolation was in the friendship and protection of his powerful neighbour, before whose strength and firmness of manner and character (to say nothing of his bodily prowess, which, although it can never be exerted against them, does yet insensibly influence all women) the prim maiden quailed amain. With Stephen to back him, Peter dared attend public meetings and private clubs; and, when sorely put to it by Judith's lectures, would slip through the back way into Mrs. Lane's parlour, basking in the repose of her

gentleness, or excited by her good husband's merriment, until all the evils of his home were fairly forgotten. Of course, the kind butcher and his sweet wife loved the kind harmless creature whom they, and they alone, had the power of raising into comfort and happiness; and he repaid their affection by the most true and faithful devotion to Stephen in all affairs, whether election contests or squabbles of the corporation or the vestry. Never had leader of a party a more devoted adherent; and abating his one fault of weakness, a fault which brought its own punishment, he was a partisan who would have done honour to any cause, honest, open, true, and generous,and one who would have been thoroughly hospitable, if his sister would but have let him.

As it was, he was a good fellow when she was out of the way, and had, like the renowned Jerry Sneak, his own moments of halfafraid enjoyment, on club-nights, and at Christmas parties, when, like the illustrious pinmaker, he sang his song and told his story with the best of them, and laughed, and rubbed his hands, and cracked his joke, and would have been quite happy, but for the clinging thought of his reception at home, where sat his awful sister, for she would sit up for him,

"Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

spirits were altogether gone, and his very heart seemed breaking.

Affairs were in this posture, when, one fine afternoon in the beginning of October, Stephen was returning across Sunham Common from a walk that he had been taking over some of his pastures, which lay at a little distance from his house. He was quite unaccompanied, unless, indeed, his pet dog, Smoker, might be termed his companion-an animal, of high blood and great sagacity, but so disguised by his insupportable fatness, that I, myself, who have generally a tolerable eye when a greyhound is in question, took him for some new-fangled quadruped from foreign parts,-some monstrous mastiff from the Anthropophagi, or Brobdignaggian pointer.Smoker and his master were marching leisurely up Sunham Common, under the shade of a noble avenue of oaks, terminating at one end by a spacious open grove of the same majestic tree; the sun at one side of them, just sinking beneath the horizon, not making his usual "golden set," but presenting to the eye a ball of ruddy light; whilst the vapoury clouds on the east were suffused with a soft and delicate blush, like the reflection of roses on an alabaster vase;-the bolls of the trees stood out in an almost brassy brightness, and large portions of the foliage of the lower branches were bathed, as it were, in gold, whilst the upper boughs retained the rich russet brown of the season;-the green turf beneath was pleasant to the eye and to the tread, fragrant with thyme and aromatic herbs, and dotted here and there with the many-coloured fungi of autumn;-the rooks were returning to their old abode in the oak-tops, children of all ages were gathering acorns underneath; and the light smoke was curling from the picturesque cottages, with their islets of gardens, which, intermingled with straggling horses, cows, and sheep, and intersected by irregular pools of water, dotted the surface of the vil

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm." However, Stephen generally saw him in, and broke the first fury of the tempest, and sometimes laughed it off altogether. With Stephen to back him, he was not so much afraid. He even, when unusually elevated with punch, his favourite liquor, would declare that he did not mind her at all; what harm could a woman's scolding do? And though his courage would ooze out somewhat as he approached his own door, and ascended the three steep steps, and listened to her sharp, angry tread in the passage, (for her very foot-lage-green. steps were, to Peter's practised ear, the precursors of the coming lecture,) yet, on the whole, whilst shielded by his champion and protector, the jolly butcher, he got on pretty well, and was, perhaps, as happy as a man linked to a domineering woman can well expect to be.

Mr. Lane's removal was a terrible stroke to Peter. The distance, it was true, was only half a mile; but the every-day friend, the next-door neighbour, was gone; and the poor poulterer fretted and pined, and gave up his club and his parish-meetings, grew thinner and thinner, and paler and paler, and seemed dwindling away into nothing. He avoided his old friend during his frequent visits to the Butts, and even refused Mrs. Lane's kind and pressing invitations to come and see them at Sunham. His sister's absence or presence had ceased to make any difference in him; his

It was a scene in which a poet or a painter would have delighted. Our good friend Stephen was neither. He paced along, supporting himself on a tall, stout hoe, called a paddle, which, since he had turned farmer, he had. assumed instead of his usual walking-stick, for the purpose of eradicating docks and thistles:-now beheading a weed-now giving a jerk amongst a drift of fallen leaves, and sending them dancing on the calm autumnal air;— now catching on the end of his paddle an acorn as it fell from the tree, and sending it back amongst the branches like a shuttlecock;

now giving a rough but hearty caress to his faithful attendant Smoker, as the affectionate creature poked his long nose into his hand ;— now whistling the beginning of one tune, now humming the end of another; whilst a train of thoughts, pleasant and unpleasant, merry and sad, went whirling along his brain. Who

"How can I?" rejoined the meek man of chickens; "she won't let me."

"Won't let him!" ejaculated the ex-butcher, with something like contempt. "Won't let him! Afore I'd let any woman dare to hinder me-Howsomever, men are not all alike. Some are as vicious as a herd of wild bulls, and some as quiet as a flock of sheep. Every man to his nature. Is there any lass whom you could fancy, Peter, provided a body could manage this virago of a sister of yours? Does any pretty damsel run in your head?"

can describe or remember the visions of half an hour, the recollections of half a mile? First, Stephen began gravely to calculate the profits of those upland pastures, called and known by the name of the Sunham Crofts; the number of tons of hay contained in the ricks, the value of the grazing, and the deduction to be made for labour, manure, tithe, and poor-rate, the land-tax, thought Stephen to himself, being redeemed;-then poor little Dinah Keep crossed his path, and dropped her modest curtsy, and brought to mind her bedridden father, and his night-mare, Jacob Jones, who had refused to make this poor cripple the proper allowance; and Stephen cursed Jacob in his heart, and resolved to send Dinah a bit of mutton that very evening;-then Smoker went beating about in a patch of furze by the side of the avenue, and Stephen diverged from his path to help him, in hopes of a hare;-"Sally Clements! Did I ever see her! Sally then, when that hope was fairly gone, and Stephen and Smoker had resumed their usual grave and steady pace, a sow, browsing among the acorns, with her young family, caught his notice and Smoker's, who had like to have had an affair with her in defence of one of the little pigs, whilst his master stopped to guess her weight."Full fourteen score," thought Stephen, "as she stands; what would it be if fatted-twenty, at least. A wonderful fine animal! I should like one of the breed." Then he recollected how fond Peter Jenkins used to be of a roast pig;-then he wondered what was the matter with poor Peter;-and just at that point of his cogitations, he heard a faint voice cry, Stephen!" and turning round to ascertain to whom the voice belonged, found himself in front of Peter himself, looking more shadowy than ever in the deepening twilight.

66

Greetings kind and hearty, passed between the sometime neighbours, and Smoker was, by no means, behindhand in expressing his pleasure at the sight of an old friend. They sat down on a bank of turf, and moss, and thyme, formed by a water-channel, which had been cut to drain the avenue in winter; and the poor poulterer poured his griefs into the sympathizing ear of his indignant friend.

"And now she's worse than ever," quoth Peter; "I think soon that she'll want the key of the till. She won't let me go to the club, or the vestry, or the mayor's dinner; and the Tories have got hold of her, and if there should happen to be an election, she won't let me vote."

"Why, I can't but say," replied Peter, (and, doubtless, if there had been light enough to see him, Peter, whilst saying it, blushed like a young girl,) "I can't but confess," said the man of the dove-cot," that there is a little maiden-Did you ever see Sally Clements?" "What!" rejoined the hero of the cleaver, Clements-the dear little girl that, when her father first broke, and then died broken-hearted, refused to go and live in ease and plenty in Sir John's family here, (and I always respected my lady for making her the offer) as nursery governess, because she would not leave her sick grandmother, and who has stayed with her ever since, waiting on the poor old woman, and rearing poultry" "She's the best fattener of turkeys in the country," interrupted Peter.

"Rearing poultry," proceeded Stephen, and looking after the garden by day, and sitting up half the night at needlework! Sally Clements-the prettiest girl within ten miles, and the best! Sally Clements-whom my mistress (and she's no bad judge of a young woman) loves as if she was her own daughter. Sally Clements! dang it, man! you shall have her. But does Sally like you?"

"I don't think she dislikes me," answered Peter, modestly. "We've had a deal of talk when I have been cheapening her poultry,― buying, I should say; for God knows, even if I had not liked her as I do, I never could have had the heart to bate her down. And I'm a great favourite with her good grandmother; and you know what a pleasure it would be to take care of her, poor old, lady! as long as she lives, and how comfortably we could all live together in the Butts. Only Judith

Hang Judith!-you shall have the girl, man!" again ejaculated Stephen, thumping the broken paddle against the ground-" you shall have her, I say!"

"But think of Judith! And then, since Jacob Jones has got hold of her' "Jacob Jones!" exclaimed Stephen, in breathless astonishment.

"Yes. Did I not tell you that she was converted to the Tories? Jacob Jones has got hold of her; and he and she both say that I'm in a consumption, and want me to quarrel with you, and to make my will, and leave

all to her, and make him executor; and then I do believe they would worry me out of my life, and marry before I was cold in my coffin, and dance over my grave," sighed poor Peter. "Jacob Jones!" muttered Stephen to himself, in soliloquy; "Jacob Jones!" And then, after ten minutes' hard musing, during which he pulled off his hat, and wiped his face, and smoothed down his shining hair, and broke the remains of his huge paddle to pieces, as if it had been a willow twig, he rubbed his hands with a mighty chuckle, and cried, with the voice of a Stentor, "Dang it, I have it!" "Harkye, man!" continued he, addressing Peter, who had sat pensively on one side of his friend, whilst Smoker reposed on the other-"Harkye, man! you shall quarrel with me, and you shall make your will. Send Lawyer Davis to me to-night; for we must see that it shall be only a will, and not a conveyance or a deed of gift; and you shall also take to your bed. Send Thomson, the apothe-light-heartedness which supplied the needful cary, along with Davis; they 're good fellows both, and will rejoice in humbugging Miss Judith. And then you shall insist on Jacob's marrying Judith, and shall give her five hundred pounds down, that's a fair fortune, as times go; I don't want to cheat the woman; besides it's worth any thing to be quit of her; and then they shall marry. Marriages are made in heaven, as my mistress says; and if that couple don't torment each other's heart out, my name's not Stephen. And when they are fairly gone off on their bridal excursion, to Windsor, may be; ay, Mistress Judith used to want to see the Castle,-off with them to Windsor from the church-door; -and then for another will, and another wedding-hey, Peter! and a handsome marriagesettlement upon little Sally. We'll get her and her grandmother to my house to-morrow, and my wife will see to the finery. Off with you, man! Don't stand there, between laughing and crying but get home and set about it. And mind you don't forget to send Thomson and Lawyer Davis to me this very evening."

only won, but secured, the warm and constant affection of the kind-hearted bachelor. It was a chubby, noisy, sturdy, rude, riotous elf, of some three years old, still petticoated, but so self-willed, and bold, and masterful, so strong, and so conscious of his strength, so obstinate and resolute, and, above all, so utterly contemptuous of female objurgation, and rebellious to female rule, (an evil propensity that seems born with the unfair sex,) that it was by no means necessary to hear his Christian name of Tom, to feel assured that the urchin in question belonged to the masculine half of the species. Nevertheless, daring, wilful, and unruly as it was, the brat was loveable, being, to say the truth, one of the merriest, drollest, best-natured, most generous, and most affectionate creatures that ever bounded about this work-a-day world; and Mr. Singleton, who, in common with many placid quiet persons, liked nothing so well as the reckless

And home went Stephen, chuckling; and, as he said, it was done,-ay, within a fortnight from that very day; and the two couples were severally as happy and as unhappy as their several qualities could make them-Mr. and Mrs. Jones finding so much employment in plaguing each other, that the good poulterer and his pretty wife, and Stephen, and the hamlet of Sunham, were rid of them altogether.

THE SAILOR'S WEDDING. BESIDES Mrs. Martin, her maid Patty, and her cat, there was one inmate of the little toyshop in the market-place, who immediately attracted Mr. Singleton's attention, and not

impetus to his own tranquil spirit, took to the boy the very first evening, and became, from that hour, his most indulgent patron and protector, his champion in every scrape, and refuge in every calamity. There was no love lost between them. Tom, who would have resisted Mrs. Martin or Patty to the death; who, the more they called him, the more he would not come, and the more they bade him not do a thing the more he did it; who, when cautioned against wetting his feet, jumped up to his neck in the water-tub, and when desired to keep himself clean, solaced himself and the tabby cat with a game at romps in the coal-hole; who, in short, whilst under female | dominion, played every prank of which an unruly boy is capable-was amenable to the slightest word or look from Mr. Singleton, came at his call, went away at his desire; desisted at his command from riding the unfortunate wooden steed, who, to say nothing of two or three dangerous falls, equally perilous to the horse and rider, ran great risk of being worn out by Master Tom's passion for equestrian exercise; and even under his orders abandoned his favourite exercise of parading

mine, of some four or five years old, of very delicate *I remember an imp, the son of a dear friend of frame, but of a most sturdy and masterful spirit, who one day standing on the fawn without a hat, in the midst of a hard rain, said to his mother, who, after nurses and nursery-maids had striven in vain with gentler influence to prevail on him to come in doors the screaming, kicking, struggling urchin, tried her for fear of catching cold :-"I won't go in! I will stand here! I choose to catch cold! I like to be ill! and if you plague me much longer, I'll die!" This hopeful young gentleman has outlived the perils of his childhood, (I suppose his self-will was drubbed out of him by stronger and equally determined comrades at a public school.) and he is now an aspirant of some eminence in the literary and political world. I have not seen him these twenty years: but if this note should meet his eye, and he should happen to recognize his own portrait, he would be amused by my tender recollection of his early days.

before the door beating a toy-drum, or blowing a penny-trumpet, and producing from those noisy implements a din more insupportable than ever such instruments have been found capable of making, before or since.

Mr. Singleton recommended so strongly to his notice and protection. But after he had been with him about the same time that he had passed with the dame of the day-school, he, in answer to his patron's anxious inquiries, made a prophecy nearly resembling hers,-to wit, that Tom Lyndham, spirited, intelligent, and clever as he undoubtedly was, seemed to him the most unlikely boy of his form to become an eminent scholar.

Mr. Singleton did more: not content with the negative benefit of restraining Master Tom's inclination for idleness, he undertook and accomplished the positive achievement of commencing his education. Under his auspices, at a cost of many cakes and much gin- And as time wore away, this persuasion gerbread, and with the great bribe of being only became the more rooted in the good able to read for himself the stories of fairies Doctor's mind. "He may, to be sure, take to and giants, of Tom Thumb, and Blue Beard, Greek, as you say, Mr. Singleton, and go off and Cinderella, and Sindbad the Sailor, which to Oxford on the archbishop's foundation; he was now fain to coax his aunt and her maid things that seem as impossible do sometimes Patty into telling him, did Tom conquer the happen; nevertheless, to judge from probamysteries of the alphabet and spelling-book, bilities, and from the result of a pretty long in spite of the predictions of the dame of a experience, I should say that to expect from neighbouring day-school, who had had the Tom Lyndham any thing beyond the learning poor boy at her academy, as she was pleased that will bear him creditably through the to call it, for half a year, during which time school and the world, is to demand a change she and her birch, put together, had not been of temper and of habit not far from miraculous. able to teach him the difference between AI don't say what the charms of the Greek and B, and who now, in the common spirit of I prophecy in which "the wish is father to the thought," boldly foretold that "all the Mr. Singletons in England would never make a scholar of Tom Lyndham; she, for her part, had no notion of a child, who not only stole her spectacles, but did not mind being whipt for it when he had done. She wished no ill to the boy, but he would come to no good. All the world would see that."

Strange as it may seem, this effusion of petty malice had its effect in stimulating the efforts of our good curate. The spirit of contradiction, that very active principle of our common nature, had its existence even in him; but, as bees can extract wax and honey from poisonous plants, so in his kind and benevolent temper it showed itself only in an extraordinary activity in well-doing. "Tom Lyndham shall be a scholar," thought and said Mr. Singleton; and as his definition of the word was something different from that of the peevish old sibyl, whose notion of scholarship reached no farther than the power of reading or rather chanting, without let or pause, a chapter of crabbed names in the Old Testament, with such a comprehension of the sense as it pleased Heaven, and such a pronunciation as would have made a Hebraist stare, he not only applied himself earnestly to the task of laying a foundation of a classical education, by teaching the boy writing, ciphering, and the rudiments of the Latin grammar, but exerted all his influence to get him admitted, at as early an age as the rules would permit, to the endowed grammar-school of the town.

The master of the school, a man who united, as we have before said, great learning to a singular generosity of character and sweetness of temper, received with more than common kindness the fine open-countenanced boy, whom

Grammar may effect, but, in my mind, the boy who is foremost in every sport, and first in every exercise; who swims, and rows, and dances, and fences better than any lad of his inches in the county; and who, in defence of a weaker child, or to right some manifest wrong, will box, ay, and beat into the bargain, a youth half as big again as himself; and who moreover is the liveliest, merriest, pleasantest little fellow that ever came under my observation-is far fitter for the camp than the college. Send him into the world: that's the place for him. Put him into the army, and I'll answer for his success. For my own part, I should not wonder to find him enlisting some day; neither should I care; for if he went out a drummer, he'd come back a general; nothing can keep down Tom Lyndham :" and with this prognostic, at once pleasant and puzzling, (for poor Mr. Singleton had not an acquaintance in the army, except the successive recruiting-officers who had at various times carried off the heroes of Belford,) the worthy Doctor marched away.

Fortune, however, who seems to find amusement in sometimes disappointing the predictions of the wise, and sometimes bringing them to pass in the most unexpected manner, and by totally opposite means, had a different destiny for our friend Tom.

It so happened that one of the principal streets of our good town of Belford, a street the high road through which leading westward, bore the name of Bristol-street, boasted a bright red mansion, retired from the line of houses, with all the dignity of a dusty shrubbery, a sweep not very easy to turn, a glaring bit of blank wall, and a porte cochère. Now the wall being itself somewhat farther back than the other houses in the street, and the space between that and the ordinary pavement