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scorn of those purse-proud kindred who

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and poor Margaret's tears fell fast. Ought I to be there, dear uncle? I will go or stay as you direct ?"

-" and her blameless life-that all wished her absence, and would contribute as far as in them lay to turn her from her home; and in spite of the encouraging influence of her lately known kinsman's cheering forebodings, her heart sank within her as the door of the carriage was thrown open. An elderly gentleman, very neatly dressed, but pallid, emaciated, and lame, was assisted by his servants up the two low steps that led to the porch. Having ascended them with some difficulty, he turned round, took off his hat, bowed with a gracious smile to the assembly, and then paused, as if in search of some one whom he expected to see.

"Go, Margaret! Go, and fear nothing. Gather up your treasures; the jug, whose generous draught was the sweetest I ever quaffed; the wheat-ears; and the cradle with its crowing babe,-blessings on its dear face! Go boldly. I will not shame you by these unseemly rags; but will rest awhile under the friendly shade of the hazel, while you return home and prepare for the procession. Be sure that you fail not. We shall meet again soon, dear ones. For the present, farewell.”

The effect of this apparition was a start of surprise and horror from the portly landlady, seldom equalled on the stage or off; her bro

And something there was about the old man, ragged, sick, and lame as he was, that Margaret found it impossible to disobey. So, heart-ther the haberdasher, who had just flourished ened up, she knew not why, (for many have felt, without being able to give the feeling its true name, the mingled power of sympathy and appreciation to comfort and to cheer,) she called about her her blooming children and departed; Annie and herself bearing the cradle between them, and the boy laden with the gleanings of the day.

The setting sun gleamed brightly between the noble elms that formed the beautiful avenue to Corston Hall, gilding the rugged branches and turning into pendent emeralds the leaves of the branches which, across the wide carriage-road, met and interleaved in a lengthened archway that might well have suggested the rich intricacies of a cathedral aisle in the proudest days of Gothic architecture. The village bells pealed amain, horses pranced, flags waved, the children of the parish schools strewed the gaudy flowers of early autumn; and as the carriage of the new lord of the manor rolled between the ivied lodges to the grey old Hall, a quaint irregular structure of Elizabeth's or James's days, with a tame peacock sunning himself on the stone balustrade, a large old English spaniel barking on the steps, and the tenants in their holiday apparel grouped around the porch, an artist, whether painter or poet, might have envied the accident which produced an arrangement so felicitously picturesque.

Something of this feeling, however unperceived or unguessed by herself, mingled with the natural emotions of curiosity and interest in our friend Margaret's bosom, as, standing humbly apart between her two elder children, with her infant in her arms, under a large sycamore, she gazed around upon the scene, and perceived, gaily adorned in the extreme of the country fashion, the rival candidate for her beloved cottage-the buxom landlady of the Red Lion, surrounded by the unfriendly kindred of her late husband. Neither Margaret nor her William had ever applied for assistance to these people, and yet she knew instinctively that some from pride and some from shame felt the silent reproach of her unassisted poverty

his hat preparatory to leading the general cheer, let it fall in dismay, looking the curses which his habitual hypocrisy scarce repressed; cousin Anthony, the rich miserable miser, smothered a groan; and Nicholas Hume, in spite of his consummate impudence, fairly stole away.

What in the meanwhile did our friends in their humble nook under the sycamore? Little Michael danced for joy; Annie clapped her hands; and poor Margaret for the twentieth time during the last six hours, burst into tearstears, this time, however, of unmingled joy.

"Mrs. Leslie! Margaret! my dear niece!" cried Michael, or as we may now call him, Mr. Norris, advancing to meet her; "to you alone of all my relations now living do I owe any account of my motives for coming amongst you as I have done to-day. With the rest of my kindred I have done for ever. But I also owe some explanation to my tenants and future neighbours. You all know that I left England about fifty years ago, a poor and friendless lad. I returned nearly thirty years afterwards, with riches honestly obtained, the happy husband of a wealthy and excellent woman, and the father of four hopeful children. I came to Corston; found my relations, some indigent, some comfortably situated; did what good I could amongst them, and went back to Jamaica, with the view at some future day of placing my sons at the head of my plantations in that island, and coming home to die in my native village. A hurricane passed over the estate where I lived, destroying my dwelling, my wife, my children, and almost myself. For many years I was dead to the world; but care had been taken of the large property that remained to me, and when, by God's mercy, I was restored to health, mental and bodily, I found myself rich indeed, so far as money was concerned-richer than ever; but in the blessed charities of life most poor-a childless, desolate, bereaved old man. I knew that a report had gone abroad that I was ruined by the hurricane, and resolved to prove the relations I had left in England, by coming amongst them

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TAP! went a modest, timid, shy-sounding knock against the old-fashioned oaken door of William Marshall's domicil, in the brief twilight of a September evening-the hour of all others in which a pretty young woman might, with the least risk of observation, pay a visit to a handsome bachelor-the best hour to shield her from the attacks of village gossiping, or to cover her own confusion, should her errand be such as to challenge something like a jest on the part of her host.

Tap! tap! again went the slender forefinger; but although the reiterated summons was a thought louder than the first nearly inaudible demand for admittance, it was equally unsuccessful in arousing the attention of the master of the dwelling.

For this abstraction there was a reason which the young and tender-hearted will admit to be valid; the poor youth was in love, and to enhance that calamity he had quarrelled with the mistress of his affections.

William Marshall, at the time of which I write, schoolmaster of Aberleigh, the only son of one of the poorest widows in the parish, was a person of great merit. Some quickness and much industry had given him a degree of information and refinement unusual in his station, and his excellent conduct and character had secured the friends whom his talents had attracted. In short, he was one of those instances more frequent than the grumblers of the world are willing to admit-which prove that even in this life desert is pretty certain to meet its reward.

The ancient pedagogue of the village, a man of some learning, who availed himself of the large and airy school-house to add boarders, who aspired to the accomplishments of mathematics and the classics, to the sturdy country lads, whom, by the will of the founder, he was bound to instruct in reading and writing, declared that this his darling scholar caught up, untaught and unflogged, all that he painfully endeavoured to instil, by book and birch, into

the fortunate pupils whose fathers were rich enough to pay for teaching and whipping; and he followed up this declaration not only by installing him, at the early age of seventeen, into the post of his assistant, but by recommending him so warmly to the trustees as his successor, that at his death, which occurred about six years after, William Marshall, in spite of his youth, was unanimously elected to fill the place of his old master, and took possession of the pretty house upon School Green, with its two noble elms in front, as well as the large garden, orchard, and meadow, which the brook, after crossing the green, and being in turn crossed by the road and the old ivied bridge, went cranking round so merrily, clear, bright, and rapid as ever rolled rivulet.

Now this, besides its pleasantness as a residence, formed a position which, considering the difference of the age and times, might be reckoned, for our modest scholar, full as good as the magnificent proffer of the green gown, cows, grass, and four merks a-year, made by the good Abbot Boniface to Halbert Glendinning, and by the said Halbert Glendinning, to the unspeakable astonishment and scandal of the assistants, unceremoniously rejected; since, in addition to the stipend paid regularly as quarter-day came round, and the prospect of as many boarders as the house would hold, was the probable contingency of the tax-gathering and rate-collecting, the timber-valuing and land-measuring, which usually falls to the share of the schoolmaster, together with the reversion of the office of parish-clerk, provided always, that for a "master of scholars,"† who taught Latin and Greek and took boarders, such offices were not held infra dig.

William Marshall's humble wishes were gratified. He was a happy man; for, in addition to the comfort of having a respectable home for the infirm mother to whom he had always been a most exemplary son, he had the gratification (so at least said the gossips of Aberleigh) of preparing a suitable abode for one of the best and prettiest of our village maidens.

Ever since the days of Pyramus and Thisbe proximity has been known for the friend of love; and such was probably the case in the present instance, since Lucy Wilmot, the object of William Marshall's passion, was his next neighbour, the brook of which we have made honourable mention being the sole barrier by which her father's meadows were divided from the garden and orchard of the school.

A more beautiful boundary was never seen than that clear babbling stream, which went wandering in and out, at its own sweet will," with such infinite variety of margin; now fringed with alders, now tufted with hawthorn

* Vide "The Monastery."

"A scholar, sir! I was a master of scholars.". Lingo, in the Agreeable Surprise.

and hazel, now rising into a steep bank crowned |ing spot for a rural flirtation was that mirrorby a giant oak flinging its broad arms across like stream! What tender words floated across the waters, the reflection of its rich indented it! What smiles and blushes looked brightly foliage broken by the frequent dropping of a down into the bright waters! And of how smooth acorn from its dimpled cup; now slop- many of the small gifts, the graceful homages ing gently down into a verdant bay enamelled in which love delights, was that clear brook with flowers of all hues, the intensely blue the witness! From the earliest violet to the forget-me-not half hidden under the light yel- latest rose, from the first blushing cherry to low clusters of the cross-leaved bedstraw, the Katherine pear, rich and ruddy as Lucy's while the purple spikes of the willow-herb own round healthful cheek, not an offering waved amidst the golden chalices of the loose-escaped the assiduity of the devoted lover. strife, and large patches of the feathery meadow-sweet, the heliotrope of the fields, spread its almond-like fragrance and its pale and feathery beauty to the very centre of the stream, overhanging the snowy blossoms of the waterlily as they rose from their deep-green leaves, and mingling with the most remarkable of the many sedges that border our English streams, whose flowers placed so regularly on either side of their tall stalks, resemble balls of ebony thickly set with ivory spikes. Certainly, of all possible methods of dividing or uniting persons and property, this bright and cheerful stream seemed the most propitious to social intercourse, as William and Lucy found by experience.

Halcyon days were these to our friend William, when an affliction befel him in the very scene of his happiness-a shadow fell across the sunshine of his love, so hideous and gloomy as to darken his whole future prospects, to sadden and embitter his very life. Like many other swift and sudden poisons, nothing could be more innocent in appearance than this implement of mischief, which wore the quiet and unoffending form of an unopened letter.

contrary, the epistle was sealed with a pretty device of doves drinking from the same shallow bowl-an imitation of the exquisite doves of the Vatican-which he himself had given to Lucy, his first pledge of love, and directed in her well-known hand to

Mr. WILLATTS,

Hovering one day by the side of the stream, waiting with a basket of filberts, "brown as the squirrel whose teeth crack them,” as Fletcher has it-filberts firm, juicy, and fragrant, the first of the season-waiting until the close of evening should bring his Lucy to tend the The green in front of the school-house formed poultry under the great oak- he saw a letter a commodious natural play-ground for the child- on the grass, and springing from bank to bank ren, sufficiently near for safety, and yet wide on a spot a little higher up, where the brook enough for all their sports, the noble game of was sufficiently narrow to admit of this sort of cricket included; so that those sharp little lover's leap, he stooped for the paper, suspecteyes which love so dearly to pry into the ing, sooth to say, that it might be some billetweaknesses of their elders, especially when doux of his own, with the design of returning those elders assume the double relation of ex-it to the fair owner. His it was not. On the ample and preceptor, were, during the intervals of tuition, happily engaged elsewhere; and really nobody, except perhaps a lover, would believe how attentive William Marshall became to the cow which was tethered in the orchard, how punctual in culling himself all the fruit and vegetables needed from the garden, how assiduous, above all, in watering his mother's little flower-plot sloping down to the stream; whilst on her part it was at least equally remarkable how often Lucy Wilmot found cause to fill her pail at the brook, or to Well did William Marshall know this Mr. feed the ducks, geese, chickens, and turkeys, Willats! Well did he know and heartily did which she had dislodged from their old home, he despise this dandy of the Red Boot, who— the farm-yard, to establish by the water-side. slim, civil, and simpering, all rings and chains, Never were poultry so zealously looked after. smirks and grimaces, curls and essencesIt happened to be a dry summer; and it stands skipped about in his second-hand coxcombry, upon record at the Brook Farm that Lucy vol- as if the vending of earthly boots and shoes unteered to fetch all the water wanted for do- were too gross for so ethereal a personage, and mestic use by the whole family. "To be glass-slipper maker to Cinderella were his fitsure," as her sisters would laughingly observe, ting designation! William always had dis"they had sometimes to wait for it, especially liked him, in virtue of the strong antipathy if it were towards dinner time, or before break-which opposite holds to opposite; and now to fast, or after school broke up." And then Lucy would blush, and declare that she would never go near the place again; and then, by way of keeping her word, she would take up her little basket of barley, and run across the meadow to feed her chickens.

Halcyon days were these. What a charm

at the Red Boot, Bristol Street, Belford.

see a letter to him directed by Lucy,- his Lucy,-sealed too with that seal! "But she would explain it! of course she would! she must, she should explain what motive she could have for writing to such a creature as that, after confessing her love for him, after all had been arranged between her father and him

self, and everything was prepared for their marriage before the ensuing Christmas. He had a right to demand an explanation, and ought not to be content with anything short of the most ample and satisfactory account of the whole matter."

Just as he had worked himself up to the very climax of angry suspicion, his fair mistress, with her eyes cast down upon the grass, evidently in search of the lost letter, advanced slowly towards the spot. She started when she saw him, and when he presented the epistle, with a greeting in the true spirit of the above soliloquy, in which a stern and peremptory demand for explanation was mingled with an ironical and contemptuous congratulation upon the correspondent whom she had chosen, her answer, between confusion at the discovery, indignation at the jealousy so openly avowed, and astonishment at the high tone taken by one who had hitherto shown nothing but the gentlest tenderness, displayed so much displeasure, vexation, and embarrassment, that the dialogue grew rapidly into a quarrel, and ended in a formal separation between the lovers. Each party returned home angry and grieved. William most angry, if we may judge from his sending the unlucky filberts, basket and all, floating down the stream; Lucy most grieved, if the crumpled letter and defaced address, so nearly washed out by her tears that it required all the skill and experience of the Belford postmaster to decipher the legend, may be accepted as evidence.

In spite, however, of this token of her fond relenting, the first tidings that William Marshall heard of Lucy were that she had gone on a visit to her god-mother twenty miles off. William, on his part, staid at home instructing his pupils as well as he could. In spite of lovers' quarrels the work of the world goes on. To be sure the poor boys wondered why their master, usually so even-tempered, was so difficult to satisfy; and his fond mother could not comprehend why, when she spoke to him, her son, always so mindful of his only remaining parent, answered at cross purposes. But William, although a lover, was a strongminded man; and before a week had elapsed he had discovered his own infirmity, and had determined to correct it. Accordingly he opened his desk, took out the map of an estate which he had just finished measuring before the unlucky adventure of the hero of the Red Boot, and having compared his own mensuration of the different fields with the estimated extent, and completed the necessary calculations, had just relapsed into a reverie when the interruption occurred which formed the commencement of our little story.

Tap! tap! tap! sounded once again, and this time a little impatiently. Tap! tap! tap! "Ah, my good cousin Kate!" said William, at last admitting the poor damsel, who had waited this unmerciful while at the door, of

which detention our lover had, one hardly knows how, a glimmering consciousness; "I hope you have not been long detained! Why did not you knock louder? Do you want my mother? No; or you would not have come to the door of my little room. You want me, Kate, I see. So tell me at once what I can do for you."

And smiling, blushing, hesitating, Kate confessed "that she did want her cousin William; that she had a letter-" (William started and winced at the very sound) "a letter to write; and she was such a poor scholar, and the friend who used to write her letters was away; so she had come to trouble cousin William.'

"No trouble at all, dear Kate!" replied William, recovering from his confusion, and too much occupied with the recollections awakened by the very name of a letter to observe the embarrassment of his pretty visiter; "no trouble at all. Here is my paper ready. Now begin. Is it to your brother in London ?" "Oh no!" replied the blushing damsel; "not to my brother; to- -a friend." "Very well!" said William. "The days draw in so fast that it will soon be dark. Begin, dear Kate!"

And after a little hesitation, and playing with a folded letter that she held in her hand, Kate, in a very low, hesitating voice, began to dictate: "Dear Francis-"

"Dear Frances," echoed her amanuensis, unsuspectingly, in a still lower tone; then pausing, and looking up as expecting her to proceed.

"Stop!" said Kate; "only that it is wrong to give you the trouble to begin again—but that sounds so formal !"

"I think it does," replied William, dashing his pen rapidly through the words; "and the abbreviation is so pretty too. There," continued he; "Dear Fanny! that sounds as well again!"

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Fanny!" exclaimed Kate, half laughing in the midst of her blushes. "Fanny, indeed! Why cousin William !"

And cousin William, awaking immediately to the perception of the true state of the case, dashed out the second beginning as rapidly as he had done the first, and laughing with a very good grace at his own stupidity, wrote this time in full assurance of being right,"Dear Frank!”

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has been kept a secret till now, because his friends are so much better to do in the world than mine; for he is a tradesman, William, going into partnership with his late master; they are so much richer and grander than father, that we thought they might not like their eldest son to marry a poor working-girl. But he said they would only look to good character, and so they say in this letter, and they have consented; and he told them, how you, my own cousin, had got on by your good conduct, William, and how proud he was of knowing you

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oped under the most extraordinary disadvantages, is as certain and far more frequent than the powers of music and painting, in language, and in calculation, the Mozarts, the Correggios, the admirable Crichtons, and American boys, those wonders of learning, of science, and of art, whose lives crowd our biographical dictionaries, and whose heads (as handed down in books and portraits) form the triumph of the phrenologist. Separate from the fondness for animals generally, and more distinctive and engrossing perhaps than any other species of that very engrossing propensity, is the passion for birds. Boys are liable to it as a class; and so they say is that particular order of sin"Yes, to be sure! Don't you remember gle women ungallantly termed old maids. It our all drinking tea together at Farmer Wil- prevails a good deal in certain callings, chiefly latt's last Sunday was three weeks? Lucy among sedentary artisans, such as tailors, knew it all along." shoemakers, and hair-dressers in provincial "Frank! Frank Willatts ?" inquired Wil-towns. A barber in Belford Regis is amongst liam eagerly. "Was it for you, then, that the most eminent fanciers of the profession, Lucy wrote that letter?" and wins all the prizes at canary-shows for "To be sure she did. And were you jeal-twenty miles round. Also the taste is apt to ous of her, William? And was that why she went away? Oh, William! William! to be jealous of dear, good Lucy, because she kept my secret! Oh! cousin William !"

"I know him, then !" interrupted William, with pleased curiosity.

run in families, descending from father to son through many generations. Ours, for instance, happens to be so distinguished. My grandfather had an extensive aviary, and was But William was too happy to be very peni- a celebrated breeder of the whole tribe of songtent, and Kate was too pleased and too busy birds; and his brother, my grand-uncle, is even to dilate upon his offences. She had her letter now remembered as the first importer of the to dictate, and, with a little help from her will-nightingale into Northumberland. He had ing amanuensis, a very pretty letter it was; and so completely in charity with all the world, especially with the Franks of the world, was this amanuensis, that, before he had finished 'Kate's epistle, he had written himself into such feelings of good-will towards her correspondent as to add a most friendly and cousinly postscript on his own account.

What were the contents of the far more ardent and eloquent letter which William Marshall afterwards wrote, and whether he did or did not obtain his mistress's pardon for his jealousy, and its fruits, we leave to the imagination of our fair readers. We, for our part, knowing the clemency of the sex, incline to think that he did.

HOP GATHERING.

two in cages which he kept for several years,
to the unspeakable delight of the neighbour-
hood, who used to crowd round his hospitable
door to listen to their matchless note-one of
the few celebrated things in the world which
thoroughly deserves its reputation. My dear
father is no degenerate descendant of his bird-
loving progenitors. It was but the other night
that he was telling me under what circumstan-
ces he first went to the play. When a little
boy at a preparatory school at Hexham, a
strolling company visited the town, and being
about to get up The Padlock,' recommended,
I suppose, by the fewness of the characters,
and in great distress for a bullfinch, a property
essential to Leonora's song,-

Say, little, foolish, fluttering thing,
Whither, ah! whither would you wing
Your airy flight!"

the manager, having heard that he possessed a tame bullfinch, came to him to request the loan, which he granted with characteristic I Do not know whether in the list of organs good-humour, and received in return from the which figure upon the skull-maps in the sys- grateful manager a free admittance for the seatem of Doctors Gall and Spurzheim, there be son. Fancy the pride and delight of the boy any which being translated (for of a verity the in seeing his favourite figuring upon the stage, language of phrenology needs translation) and hearing the applause of the audience as he would indicate a fondness for animals. Most perched upon the prima donna's finger! This assuredly, if no such propensity be therein must have been considerably above seventy marked, it is an important omission, and should years ago; and (for in this respect as well as be supplied forthwith; for that such an indica- in his general kindness, the boy was father tion does exist most strongly in numberless to the man,') the fancy has remained ever since individuals of both sexes, and is often devel-in full force and constant exercise. There is

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