dent to such a calamity overpowered all minor noises.

In the meanwhile I became aware that a fourth party of visiters had entered the garden, my excellent neighbour, Miss Mortimer, and three other ladies, whom she introduced as Mrs. and the Misses Dobbs; and the botanists and florists having departed, and the disaster | at the mast being repaired, quiet was so far restored, that I ushered my guests into the greenhouse, with something like a hope that we should be able to hear each other speak.

Mrs. Dobbs was about the largest woman I had ever seen in my life, fat, fair, and fifty, with a broad rosy countenance, beaming with good-humour and contentment, and with a general look of affluence over her whole comfortable person. She spoke in a loud voice which made itself heard over the remaining din in the garden and out, and with a patois between Scotch and Irish, which puzzled me, until I found from her discourse that she was the widow of a linen manufacturer, in the neighbourhood of Belfast.

Ay," quoth she, with the most openhearted familiarity, "times are changed for the better with me since you and I parted in Cadogan Place. Poor Mr. Dobbs left me and those two girls a fortune of Why, I verily believe," continued she, interrupting herself," that you don't know me!" "Honor!" said one of the young ladies to the other, "only look at this butterfly!"

Honor! Was it, could it be, Honor O'Callaghan, the slight, pale, romantic visionary, so proud, so reserved, so abstracted, so elegant, and so melancholy? Had thirty years of the coarse realities of life transformed that pensive and delicate damsel into the comely, hearty, and to say the truth, somewhat vulgar dame whom I saw before me? Was such a change possible?

ra's consent to the match by the offer of taking me without a portion; and ever since," continued she, "I have been a very common-place and a very happy woman. Mr. Dobbs was a man who had made his own fortune, and all he asked of me was, to lay aside my airs and graces, and live with him in his own homely, old-fashioned way amongst his own old people, (kind people they were!) his looms, and his bleaching-grounds; so that my heart was opened, and I grew fat and comfortable, and merry and hearty, as different from the foolish, romantic girl whom you remember, as plain honest prose is from the silly thing called poetry. I don't believe that I have ever once thought of my old castles in the air for these five-and-twenty years. It is very odd, though," added she, with a frankness which was really like thinking aloud, "that I always did contrive in my visions that my history should conclude like that of Cinderella. To be sure, things are much better as they are, but it is an odd thing, nevertheless. Well! perhaps my daughters ....!"

And as they are rich and pretty, and goodnatured, although much more in the style of the present Honor than the past, it is by no means improbable that the vision which was evidently glittering before the fond mother's eyes, may be realized. At all events, my old friend is, as she says herself, a happy woman

in all probability, happier than if the Cinderella day-dream had actually come to pass in her own comely person. But the transition! After all, there are rural transformations in this every-day world, which beat the doings of fairy-land all to nothing; and the change of the pumpkin into a chariot, and the mice into horses, was not to be compared for a moment with the transmogrification of Honor O'Callaghan into Mrs. Dobbs.

AUNT DEBORAH.

"Married a nobleman!" exclaimed she when I told her the reports respecting herself. "Taken the veil! No, indeed! I have been a far humbler and happier woman. It is very strange, though, that during my Cinderella- A CROSSER old woman than Mrs. Deborah like life at school, I used always in my day- Thornby was certainly not to be found in the dreams to make my story end like that of the whole village of Hilton. Worth, in country heroine of the fairy tale; and it is still stran- phrase, a power of money, and living (to borger, that both rumours were within a very lit-row another rustic expression) upon her means, tle of coming true,-for when I got to Ireland, which, so far as I was concerned, turned out a very different place from what I expected, I found myself shut up in an old castle, fifty times more dreary and melancholy than ever was our great school-room in the holidays, with my aunt setting her heart upon marrying me to an old lord, who might, for age and infirmities, have passed for my great-grandfather; and I really, in my perplexity, had serious thoughts of turning nun to get rid of my suitor; but then I was allowed to go into the north upon a visit, and fell in with my late excellent husband, who obtained Lady O'Ha

the exercise of her extraordinary faculty for grumbling and scolding seemed the sole occupation of her existence, her only pursuit, solace, and amusement; and really it would have been a great pity to have deprived the poor woman of a pastime so consolatory to herself, and which did harm to nobody: her, family consisting only of an old labourer, to guard the house, take care of her horse, her cow, and her chaise and cart, and work in the garden, who was, happily for his comfort, stone deaf, and could not hear her vituperation, and of a parish girl of twelve, to do the indoor work, who had been so used to be scold

1

ed all her life, that she minded the noise no | after the death of her father, was exceedingly

more than a miller minds the clack of his mill, or than people who live in a churchyard mind the sound of the church-bells, and would probably, from long habit, have felt some miss of the sound had it ceased, of which, by the way, there was small danger, so long as Mrs. Deborah continued in this life. Her crossness was so far innocent that it hurt nobody except herself. But she was also cross-grained, and that evil quality is unluckily apt to injure other people; and did so very materially in the present instance.

Mrs. Deborah was the only daughter of old Simon Thornby, of Chalcott great farm; she had had one brother, who having married the rosy-cheeked daughter of the parish clerk, a girl with no portion except her modesty, her good-nature, and her prettiness, had been discarded by his father, and after trying various ways to gain a living, and failing in all, had finally died broken-hearted, leaving the unfortunate clerk's daughter, rosy-cheeked no longer, and one little boy, to the tender mercy of his family. Old Simon showed none. He drove his son's widow from the door as he had before driven off his son; and when he also died, an event which occurred within a year or two, bequeathed all his property to his daughter Deborah.

This bequest was exceedingly agreeable to Mrs. Deborah, (for she was already of an age to assume that title,) who valued money, not certainly for the comforts and luxuries which it may be the means of procuring, nor even for its own sake, as the phrase goes, but for that which, to a woman of her temper, was perhaps the highest that she was capable of enjoying, the power which wealth confers over all who are connected with or dependent on its possessor.

The principal subjects of her despotic dominion were the young widow and her boy, whom she placed in a cottage near her own house, and with whose comfort and happiness she dallied pretty much as a cat plays with the mouse which she has got into her clutches, and lets go only to catch again, or an angler with the trout which he has fairly hooked, and merely suffers to struggle in the stream until it is sufficiently exhausted to bring to land. She did not mean to be cruel, but she could not help it; so her poor mice were mocked with the semblance of liberty, although surrounded by restraints; and the awful paw seemingly sheathed in velvet, whilst they were in reality never out of reach of the horrors of the pat.

It sometimes, however, happens that the little mouse makes her escape from madam pussy at the very moment when she seems to have the unlucky trembler actually within her claws; and so it occurred in the present in

stance.

The dwelling to which Mrs. Deborah retired

romantic and beautiful in point of situation. It was a small but picturesque farm-house, on the very banks of the Loddon, a small branch of which, diverging from the parent stream, and crossed by a pretty foot-bridge, swept round the homestead, the orchard and garden, and went winding along the water meadows in a thousand glittering meanders, until it was lost in the rich woodlands which formed the back-ground of the picture. In the month of May, when the orchard was full of its rosy and pearly blossoms, a forest of lovely bloom, the meadows yellow with cowslips, and the clear brimming river, bordered by the golden tufts of the water ranunculus, and garlanded by the snowy flowers of the hawthorn and the wild-cherry, the thin wreath of smoke curling from the tall, old-fashioned chimneys of the pretty irregular building, with its porch, and its bay-windows, and gable-ends full of light and shadow,-in that month of beauty it would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful or a more English landscape.

On the other side of the narrow winding road, parted from Mrs. Deborah's demesne by a long low bridge of many arches, stood a little rustic mill, and its small low-browed cottage, with its own varied back-ground of garden and fruit-trees and thickly-wooded meadows, extending in long perspective, a smiling verdant valley of many miles.

Now Chalcott mill, reckoned by everybody else the prettiest point in her prospect, was to Mrs. Deborah not merely an eye-sore, but a heart-sore, not on its own account; cantankerous as she was, she had no quarrel with the innocent buildings, but for the sake of its inhabitants.

Honest John Stokes, the miller, was her cousin-german. People did say that some forty years before there had been question of a marriage between the parties; and really they both denied the thing with so much vehemence and fury, that one should almost be tempted to believe there was some truth in the report. Certain it is, that if they had been that wretched thing a mismatched couple, and had gone on snarling together all their lives, they could not have hated each other more zealously. One shall not often meet with anything so perfect in its way as that aversion. It was none of your silent hatreds that never come to words; nor of your civil hatreds, that veil themselves under smooth phrases and smiling looks. Their ill-will was frank, open, and above-board. They could not afford to come to an absolute breach, because it would have deprived them of the pleasure of quarrelling; and in spite of the frequent complaints they were wont to make of their near neighbourhood, I am convinced that they derived no small gratification from the opportunities which it afforded them of saying disagreeable things to each other.

And yet Mr. John Stokes was a well-mean- | it does not, all united in blaming the poor wiing man, and Mrs. Deborah Thornby was not dow for withdrawing herself and her son from an ill-meaning woman. But she was, as I Mrs. Deborah's protection. But besides that have said before, cross in the grain; and he— no human being can adequately estimate the why he was one of those plain-dealing per- misery of leading a life of dependence upon sonages who will speak their whole mind, one to whom scolding was as the air she and who pique themselves upon that sort of breathed, without it she must die, a penurious sincerity which is comprised in telling to an- dependence too, which supplied grudgingly other all the ill that they have ever heard, or the humblest wants, and yet would not permit thought, or imagined concerning him, in re- the exertions by which she would joyfully peating as if it were a point of duty, all the have endeavoured to support herself;-besides harm that one neighbour says of another, and the temptation to exchange Mrs. Deborah's in denouncing, as if it were a sin, whatever incessant maundering for the miller's rough the unlucky person whom they address may kindness, and her scanty fare for the coarse happen to do, or to leave undone. plenty of his board, besides these homely but natural temptations-hardly to be adequately allowed for by those who have passed their lives amidst smiling kindness and luxurious abundance; besides these motives she had a stronger and dearer in her desire to rescue her boy from the dangers of an enforced and miserable idleness, and to put him in the way of earning his bread by honest industry.

"I am none of your palavering chaps, to flummer over an old vixen for the sake of her strong-box. I hate such falseness. I speak the truth and care for no man," quoth John Stokes.

And accordingly John Stokes never saw Mrs. Deborah Thornby but he saluted her, pretty much as his mastiff accosted her favourite cat; erected his bristles, looked at her with savage, bloodshot eyes, showed his teeth, Through the interest of his grandfather the and vented a sound something between a snarl parish clerk, the little Edward had been early and a growl; whilst she, (like the four-footed placed in the Hilton free school, where he had tabby,) set up her back and spit at him in re-acquitted himself so much to the satisfaction

turn.

They met often, as I have said, for the enjoyment of quarrelling; and as whatever he advised she was pretty sure not to do, it is probable that his remonstrances in favour of her friendless relations served to confirm her in the small tyranny which she exercised towards them.

Such being the state of feeling between these two jangling cousins, it may be imagined with what indignation Mrs. Deborah found John Stokes, upon the death of his wife, removing her widowed sister-in-law from the cottage in which she had placed her, and bringing her home to the mill, to officiate as his housekeeper, and take charge of a lovely little girl, his only child. She vowed one of those vows of anger which I fear are oftener kept than the vows of love, to strike both mother and son out of her will, (by the way, she had a superstitious horror of that disagreeable ceremony, and even the temptation of choosing new legatees whenever the old displeased her, had not been sufficient to induce her to make one,-the threat did as well,) and never to speak to either of them again as long as she lived.

She proclaimed this resolution at the rate of twelve times an hour, (that is to say, once in five minutes,) every day for a fortnight; and in spite of her well-known caprice, there seemed for once in her life reason to believe that she would keep her word.

Those prudent and sagacious persons who are so good as to take the superintendence of other people's affairs, and to tell by the look of the foot where the shoe pinches and where

of the master, that at twelve years old he was the head boy on the foundation, and took precedence of the other nine-and-twenty wearers of the full-skirted blue coats, leathern belts, and tasseled caps, in the various arts of reading, writing, cyphering, and mensuration. He could flourish a swan without ever taking his pen from the paper. Nay, there is little doubt but from long habit he could have flourished it blindfold, like the man who had so often modelled the wit of Ferney in breadcrums, that he could produce little busts of Voltaire with his hands under the table; he had not his equal in Practice or the Rule of Three, and his piece, when sent round at Christmas, was the admiration of the whole parish.

Unfortunately, his arrival at this pre-eminence was also the signal of his dismissal from the free school. He returned home to his mother, and as Mrs. Deborah, although hourly complaining of the expense of supporting a great lubberly boy in idleness, refused to apprentice him to any trade, and even forbade his finding employment in helping her deaf man of all work to cultivate her garden, which the poor lad, naturally industrious and active, begged her permission to do, his mother, considering that no uncertain expectations of money at the death of his kinswoman could counterbalance the certain evil of dragging on his days in penury and indolence during her life, wisely determined to betake herself to the mill, and accept John Stokes's offer of sending Edward to a friend in town, for the purpose of being placed with a civil engineer: -a destination with which the boy himself-a fine intelligent youth, by the way, tall and

could not dislodge him from that entrench- ay, or the half of them, would undoubtedly ment. But he was not always so dexterous. have occasioned Mr. Adolphus's dismission, Cunning in him lacked the crowning perfection and the recall of poor Edward, every account of hiding itself under the appearance of honesty. of whom was in the highest degree favouraHis art never looked like nature. It stared ble, had the worthy miller been able to refrain you in the face, and could not deceive the from lecturing his cousin upon her neglect dullest observer. His very flattery had a tone of the one, and her partiality for the other. It of falseness that affronted the person flattered; was really astonishing that John Stokes, a and Mrs. Deborah, in particular, who did not man of sagacity in all other respects, never want for shrewdness, found it so distasteful, could understand that scolding was of all dethat she would certainly have discarded him visable processes the least likely to succeed upon that one ground of offence, had not her in carrying his point with one who was such love of power been unconsciously propitiated a proficient in that accomplishment, that if by the perception of the efforts which he made, the old penalty for female scolds, the duckingand the degradation to which he submitted, in stool, had continued in fashion, she would the vain attempt to please her. She liked the have stood an excellent chance of attaining to homage offered to "les beaux yeux de sa cas- that distinction. But so it was. The same sette," pretty much as a young beauty likes blood coursed through their veins, and his the devotion extorted by her charms, and for tempestuous good-will and her fiery anger the sake of the incense tolerated the worship- took the same form of violence and passion. per.

Nevertheless there were moments when the conceit which I have mentioned as the leading characteristic of Mr. Adolphus Lynfield had well-nigh banished him from Chalcott. Piquing himself on the variety and extent of his knowledge, the universality of his genius, he of course paid the penalty of other universal geniuses, by being in no small degree superficial. Not content with understanding every trade better than those who had followed it all their lives, he had a most unlucky propensity to put his devices into execution, and as his information was, for the most part, picked up from the column headed "varieties," in the county newspaper, where of course there is some chaff mingled with the grain, and as the figments in question were generally understood and imperfectly recollected, it is really surprising that the young gentleman did not occasion more mischief than actually occurred by the quips and quiddities which he delighted to put in practice whenever he met with any one simple enough to permit the exercise of his talents.

Some damage he did effect by his experiments, as Mrs. Deborah found to her cost. He killed a bed of old-fashioned spice cloves, the pride of her heart, by salting the ground to get rid of the worms. Her broods of geese also, and of turkeys, fell victims to a new and infallible mode of feeding, which was to make them twice as fat in half the time. Somehow or other, they all died under the operation. So did half a score of fine appletrees, under an improved method of grafting; whilst a magnificent brown Bury pear, that covered one end of the house, perished of the grand discovery of severing the bark to increase the crop. He lamed Mrs. Deborah's old horse by doctoring him for a prick in shoeing, and ruined her favourite cow, the best milch cow in the county, by a most needless attempt to increase her milk.

Now these mischances and misdemeanours,

Nothing but these lectures could have kept Mrs. Deborah constant in the train of such a trumpery, jiggeting, fidgety little personage as Mr. Adolphus, the more especially as her heart was assailed in its better and softer parts, by the quiet respectfulness of Mrs. Thornby's demeanour, who never forgot that she had experienced her protection in the hour of need, and by the irresistible good-nature of Cicely, a smiling, rosy, sunny-looking creature, whose only vocation in this world seemed to be the trying to make everybody as happy as herself.

Mrs. Deborah (with such a humanizing taste, she could not, in spite of her cantankerous temper, be all bad) loved flowers and Cicely, a rover of the woods and fields from early childhood, and no despicable practical gardener, took care to keep her beaupots constantly supplied from the first snowdrop to the last china-rose. Nothing was too large for Cicely's good-will, nothing too small. Huge chimney jars of lilacs, laburnums, horse-chestnuts, peonies, and the golden and gorgeous double-furze; china jugs filled with magnificent double stocks, and rich wallflowers,* with their bitter-sweet odour, like the taste of orange marmalade, pinks, sweet-peas, and

*Few flowers, (and almost all look best when arranged each sort in its separate vase.)-few look so well together as the four sorts of double wallflowers. The common dark, (the old bloody warrior-I have a love for those graphic names-words which paint) the common dark, the common yellow, the newer and more intensely coloured dark, and that new golp colour still so rare, which is in tint, form, growth, hardiness, and profusion, one of the most valuable acquisitions to the flower-garden. When placed together in those of deeper hue, with exactly the sort of relief, a jar, the brighter blossoms seem to stand out from the harmonious combination of light and shade, that one sometimes sees in the rich gilt carving of an old flower-wreathed picture-frame; or, better still, it might seem a pot of flowers chased in gold, by Benvenuto Cellini, in which the workmanship outvalued the metal. Many beaupots are gayer, many sweeter, but this is the richest, both for scent and colour, that I have ever seen.