claimed, "It is the dog of the poor old pedlar-harm him not-but follow him, and see where he seeks for shelter-woe's me for the honest old master, when the servant is so bested with hunger." The dog reached the foot of the little rising ground whereon we stood-he seemed spent, weary, and wounded, and the blood of the lamb and his own dyed the grass on the rivulet bank, where he lingered for a moment before he continued his flight. He then lifted his prey and dived into the forest. We followed him up the path; the grass and the wild flowers were sprinkled with blood where he ran along-and we came first to one place, and then to another, where he had laid down his prey to rest himself and to lick his wounds. At last we arrived where the stream made a turn, and there, at the foot of an old tree, we found the poor lamb-it was living-one of the shepherds took it up, and we continued our pursuit up the rivulet. The forest now began to darken, and the stream from winding between banks of blossomed sward had to contend with thicket and with rock-its waters became contracted, and the path which still skirted its margin grew less visible-but the way was spotted with blood, and could not be mistaken.

Our hurried march was soon to come to a close. We arrived before a natural porch of lofty rocks, and gliding onward we found a little lonely sweet wild nook, hemmed in with a kind of rampart of greensward, and crowned with a garland of ancient and majestic oaks. We there beheld the old man reclining against the abrupt and flowery bank; over head, the woodbine and other fragrant bushes had shaken a multitude of blossomed tendrils down from the upper ground, while, drop by drop, a little clear spring gathered its waters into a rude natural basin at his feet. We stood and gazed on this scene of peace and awe-the old man seemed asleep, his hat lay beside him, his dress was composed with the same love of external nicety for which he was always remarkable, while an open Bible, which had apparently dropped from his hand, lay within reach. I know not that any of us felt anxious to approach him hastily-it was impossi

ble to look upon him and believe him dead, so soft and slumbering-like he lay; and yet, in truth, none of us wished to destroy the pleasing delusion that he still lived, by an immediate examination.

A raven, as we stood, stooped suddenly down from the upper bough of a neighbouring oak-another followed, and the two birds of prey, perching together on a branch midstem high, seemed to hold a consultation concerning the human body below. They sat for several minutes with necks outstretched in earnest scrutiny, and death or life appeared to be the matter on which they conferred. They descended to a lower, and still lower bough, renewing their croaking colloquy, and approaching the place where the old man lay. At every descent they made, our hopes of life became fainter and fainter, and when, quitting the underbranches, they alighted on the ground, and advanced towards him boldly abreast, we numbered him with the dead. During this period the poor and faithful dog lay unobserved at his master's side, and, though sore wounded, he gathered himself together, and turned towards his winged adversaries with an eye of fire. The ravens, apparently from the blood which trickled from his side and bosom, reckoned him an easy prey, and stood their ground; and, drawing up their wings and projecting their sharp bills, they advanced to the contest. The dog leaped upon them so swiftly and so surely, that escaping with difficulty and diminished plumes, they sought refuge on a lofty oak.

We now approached-we spoke, but no answer was returned-we shouted, we were only answered by the neighbouring echoes. The dog placed himself between his master and us, and uttering a low fierce growl, seemed willing to spring at our bosoms. We called him by his name-we held out our hands to caress him, but he waxed fiercer and fiercer; and, at last, when we stooped to touch his master, he made a leap and a snatch, but fell backwards, and had only strength to lick his master's cheek, his master's hand, and utter a low melancholy howland then he expired. The shepherds wept outright for this faithful and

noble creature, and one of them exclaimed, " Oh, John Corson, never was a man blest with such a servant as thee." But the old man's ear was shut for ever against human speech. He was stiff and cold, and seemed to have been dead for some time. We made a bier of green boughs, and bore him homeward amid the sorrow and sighs of all those who loved the simple, and pleasant, and upright old man. At his lykewake many of the sweetest voices and fairest faces in the district chaunted his funeral song, and one of the elders of the parish preferred a prayer, which rivalled a sermon in length, and outrivalled it in honest natural eloquence, in which the virtues and kindly disposition of the old man were

To P

MY DEAR P- IT falls to my lot to assure you, à la Partridge, that I am not dead nor buried,-although a fever had nearly exposed me to being both the one and the other. In the thick of my visits and wonders, I started a pulse of 106, and took violently to my room and my despair. It is not necessary that I should tell you how I escaped that termination of complaints which ultimately I shall not escape. But here I am in a sea-port town, posseting and nursing a recovery with all the arts of an experienced sufferer.

say,

Powell.

women.

I hate sentimentality, but you must nevertheless expect a little of the romantic in this chattering Let me be apology for a letter. plaintive, d's'ee, as the Devon people say. I shall just talk as I please, not caring much whether you turn to the cover and sigh over the castaway elevenpence marked there; for I am in a true Juliet mood, and pant "to speak and yet say nothing.”

I am now, P————, walking about in a yellow straw hat and India looking jacket, as pale as a moss-rose. What jessamine animals we sick gentlemen are!—When I think that I am now a poor solitary fish of a man, flung here on the beach to flap about by myself, I sigh to be any other thing-aye, even a dead pigeon in a pie, that is sure to have two or three friends by his side, with their mahogany coloured ankles in the same predicament.

Here I walk,

think, and grieve, to no purpose. What am I toiling for?-why do I covet experience, when half a century will set myself and any given dead idiot on a par?-and yet I am moralizing;-oh, what a dowlas web of wisdom is philosophy!

I am dull, am I not?-dull as the Stranger! But being just arrived

here, I am, as you will suppose, rather jaded in mind and body by the tediousness and fatigue of a long stage coach journey. I am, however, convinced that a few moderate and quiet walks in a wood, which stands on the side of a hill and just above the cottage in which I dwell, will restore the wonted elasticity of my mind, and set my stupidly sensitive and jarring nerves at rest. Like the strings of an Eolian harp, my nerves are moved with a breath; nor can I find that anything short of a perfect quiet life procures me common ease. Even the very act of writing this letter,-attended as it is with the thoughts of you all, and home, and idle fears of fever, and the foolish dread of associating with strangers in a strange place,-shakes me, as the wind stirs a branch of the mountain ash in a troubled day. If my health should be of that stubborn quality, which, mule-like, will either stop short, or move in a retrograde fashion, I shall faithfully remember my promise to your mother, and be careful against violent readings, revellings, or keen winds :-she always said I was delicate. A book I shall then look upon as a dangerous companion, and shun it as I would the society of a badger or an authoress ;-and as for an easterly wind, it may sing itself hoarse, before I will listen to its song,-and it may go whistle to its cloudy flocks for days together, and yet never prevail upon me to venture into a company so awfully pastoral. Be under no apprehensions on my account; for I have laid in good resolutions by the waggon-load, as an old lady heaps in her winter stock of coals;-I am quite determined to keep a strict eye on the weather, and to run from storms and showers as I would scamper from a herd of wild elephants. I am also pretty sure of passing a solitary and reflective life; for the family with whom I now lodge is the most regular and serene I ever beheld. It appears to move by Act of Parliament, and to think and speak by clock-work. It consists of an old gentleman, who was long master of a small trading vessel, and his wife and daughter. The father is far gone in good health and years; and having retired from the labours of life, is making up for his early troubles and tempests by an extraordinary

He

stock of quiet and calms now. appears, however, never to have been ruffled, but to have had his eye all the first part of his life on the compass, and all the last on his pipe or the weathercock. I have already watched him smoking, and he really seems charmed from all earthly vexation and care;-his thoughts appear to sleep within him; or to be so light, that he can collect them without an effort together, and whiff them away in the warm, silent, and momentary mists of his pipe. Whatever he says (but he speaks so seldom that I should think thirty words go to the day with him) is full of humanity and homely wisdom:-he appears to be able to grow all the observations necessary for his own use (so few are they) in his own heart. From the little I have seen of him I like him greatly. His person is spare, but well proportioned; and his hair begins to whiten around his brown visage, like the embers around the fire. The wife has been originally a pretty good talker, I guess,but she seems to have learned mo◄ deration from her husband;-whenever she begins, she appears to prepare her tongue for a long and se date voyage,-but a sigh from her daughter, or the perfect inattention and placid indifference of her gentle partner, arrests her progress and becalms her discourse. She is very cautious in her movements and her language, but her observations are a little too historical. The daughter,

She

whom they call Laura,-is sensible, unassuming, and pretty. cultivates her mind with books,-at least, so her conversation leads me to believe; and she seems to have read herself into a modest and delightful importance with her family. She is of a fair stature,-with light hair and blue eyes:-this almost sounds romantic! Whatever she says has an instantaneous weight with mine host and hostess,—and she never, as far as I have been able to observe, abuses her power or their confidence. There is something extremely plaintive in her air,-and an apparently habitual and occasional absence of mind,-which I cannot account for: you know that I cannot bear to see the shadow of trouble on the mind of woman. The mother found an opportunity yesterday even

ing of assuring me that her family had existed in this part of the country for many generations,-and that her great aunt had very nearly married the lord of the manor. She also contrived to inform me that her husband's vessel was copper-bottomed and a surprizingly swift sailer, and to insinuate that her daughter could read better than any girl of her age in the village, and was allowed to be the best getter-up of fine linen, far and near. She asked after my grandfather Paul with a significant sigh, and disclosed to me that he had been an admirer of hers in his youth. Heaven knows how! The entrance of her husband cut short my attention and her speech at the same moment. You will be surprized at the stock of domestic knowledge and insight into character which I have already gained;-but you will remember that I was always given to observation of this nature.

My journey here was remarkable for nothing but its tedious length and finished dullness. As I left town at night, and did not choose to alight at supper-time, my fellow travellers were not revealed to me, till the cold moist morn peeped palely through the wet windows of the coach, and discovered to me a fat old gentleman in a dingy night-cap, sleeping to some regular nasal music of his own playing, and pillowing his heavy swaddled head on the well-stuffed bolster of his own body. His face was red and full, and seemed to have imbibed the colour of Port wine as industriously as his mouth had the beverage itself. His nose was the throne of good living, and there it sat in purple pride; and a wet grey eye twinkled at intervals, like a stupid star in a foggy night. Next to this pampered sleeper sat a tall thin lady, holding a basket on her lap, and having a dark red handkerchief tied over a shabby travelling bonnet. Her eyes were wide awake, and fixed immoveably on the comfortless window. She now and then sighed or hemmed from dreariness, and moved a leg, or put back her straight hair with her hand, from utter lassitude. Occasionally she would take the tassel of the window, and smear away the moisture from the pane, though little was obtained by the act, beVOL. VI.

yond a momentary peep at one or two cold and solitary cottages, and a procession (as it would seem) of dingy pilgrim-trees. To be sure, the white morning could be seen wrapping all objects in a pale light, like a shroud, and the countenance of my tall and quiet traveller became more fixed, icy, and monumental. It gleamed up the avenue of her bonnet and handkerchief with a deathy, clammy paleness, which "looked not o'the earth," but told a silent tale of other worlds. The marble ghost in Don Juan could not have been more. terrifically still, or more frightfully pallid. To me, this fair forlorn looked like some Egyptian figure found in the pyramids, that held age to be a merit, and life to be " a thing to dream of, not to tell." A bad temper appeared to have set its mark on her upper lip; and vexation had written a few legible lines on her forehead, which were plain and intelligible to the eyes of every person. By these two several whimsical specimens of slumbering fatness and wakeful leanness was one side of the coach occupied, in the proportion of two thirds to the Sleeping Beauty, and one third to the Enchanted Damosel. Next to myself, sat a little gentleman in black, with a hairy travelling-cap drawn down over his face, so as to hide all but the end of a keen nose, and a compressed lip. I fancy that I can generally find the character in the nose, and here I found enough of the hawk to warrant me in guessing at the possessor's profession. How well has Sterne described the want of purpose in a person,-"You have no nose, Sir!" This duodecimo edition of a lawyer (for such I deemed him) was dozing, but his hand did not forsake a blue bag which rested between his knees, thus "holding fast," as the child-game saith, even in that predicament in which half the world would have "let go;" and his head continually dropped towards it, even in its sleepy helplessness. I amused myself with speculating on my companions till breakfast-time, when we all assembled round a well-stocked table; but each seemed suspicious of the other; and every cup of coffee was passed with a laudable caution, and every egg handed with a careful and silent N