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state, the pair of turtles cooing in their cage, Pyrame grunting at his mistress' feet, and Minette stretched carelessly on the hearth. He then pronounced the voluptuous "Ah!" which a man utters when he feels his bosom relieved of a heavy load. M. Simple discovered with joy that he had been the victim of a frightful nightmare!

"Oh, yes, Goody!" he said, pausing in the operation of washing his face: "let us go and see the monkeys; and to-night we will play our game of piquet. Happiness lies in peace and contentment, and not in the plagues and worries of wealth. Preserve me from such

another dream!"

SONG.

Old and New, 1871.

[Henry Neele, born in London, 20th January, 1798; died 7th February, 1828. He was an attorney by profession, but his entire sympathies were given to literature. During his brief career he produced various poems, tales, and sketches, and wrote an interesting work entitled the Romance of History. Unhappily his reason became affected, and in a fit of insanity he destroyed his own life. A complete edition of his works was published in 1829.]

"Old man, old man, thy locks are gray,

And the winter winds blow cold; Why wander abroad on thy weary way, And leave thy home's warm fold?"

"The winter winds blow cold, 'tis true, And I am old to roam;

But I may wander the wide world through, Ere I shall find my home."

"And where do thy children loiter so long?
Have they left thee, thus old and forlorn,
To wander wild heather and hills among,
While they quaff from the lusty horn?"
"My children have long since sunk to rest,

To that rest which I would were my own;
I have seen the green turf placed over each breast,
And read each loved name on the stone."

"Then haste to the friends of thy youth, old man,
Who loved thee in days of yore;
They will warm thy old blood with the foaming can,
And sorrow shall chill it no more."

"To the friends of my youth in far distant parts,
Over moor, over mount I have sped;

But the kind I found in their graves, and the hearts Of the living were cold as the dead."

The old man's cheek as he spake grew pale;
On the grass-green sod he sank,
While the evening sun o'er the western vale
Set 'mid clouds and vapours dank.

On the morrow that sun in the eastern skies
Rose ruddy and warm and bright;
But never again did that old man rise
From the sod which he press'd that night.

THE RED-NOSED LIEUTENANT.1

Five-and-twenty years ago I was just fiveand-twenty years of age. I was thus neither young nor old; in addition, I was neither handsome nor ugly, neither rich nor poor, neither active nor indolent, neither a Socrates nor a simpleton. More ordinary men than I had been married for love, poorer men had got credit and rolled on their carriage-wheels till it was out, and greater fools had been cabinet councillors. Yet all this did not satisfy me. Years had swept along, and I was exactly the same in point of publicity at five-and-twenty that I had been at fifteen. Let no man say that the passion for being something or other in the world's eye is an improbable thing. Show me that man, and I will show him my Lord A. driving a mail-coach, the Earl of B. betting at a boxing-match, the Marquis of C. the rival of his own grooms, and the Duke of D. a director of the opera. My antagonist has only to look and be convinced; for what could throw these patricians into the very jaws of public jest but the passion for publicity? I pondered long upon this, and my resolution to do something was at length fixed. But the grand difficulty remained,-what was the thing to be done? what was the grand chemin d'honneur-the longest stride to the temple of fame, the royal road to making a figure in one's generation? The step was too momentous to be rashly taken, and I took time enough, for I took a year. On my six-and-twentieth birthday I discovered that I was as wise and as public as on my birth-day before, and a year older besides! While I was in this state of fluctuation my honoured uncle arrived in town and called upon me. Let me introduce this most excellent and most mutilated man. had commenced his career in the American war-a bold, brave, blooming ensign. What he was now I shall not describe; but he had taken the earliest opportunity of glory, and at Bunker's Hill had lost an eye. He was nothing the worse as a mark for an American rifle; and at Brandywine he had the honour of seeing La Fayette run away before him, and paid only a right leg as his tribute to the victory. 1 From the Forget-me-not, 1827.

He

My uncle followed on the road to glory, gaining | under the sun. We at length came in sight of a new leaf of laurel and losing an additional the famous Rock. It loomed magnificently fragment of himself in every new battle, till from the sea; and every glass was to the eye with Burgoyne he left his nose in the swamps of as the lines and batteries, that looked like Saratoga, whence, having had the good fortune teeth in its old white head, rose grimly out of to make his escape, he distinguished himself at the waters. The veterans of the corps were in the siege of York Town, under Cornwallis, and high delight, and enumerated with the vigour left only an arm in the ditch of the rampart. of grateful recollection the cheapness of the He had returned a major, and after lying on wines, the snugness of the quarters, and the his back for two years in the military hospital, general laudible and illaudible pleasantries of was set at liberty to walk the world on a pair the place. The younger listened with the of crutches, and be called colonel. I explained respect due to experience, and, for that evenmy difficulty to this venerable remnant of sol-ing, an old red-nosed lieutenant, of whom no diership. "Difficulty!" cried he, starting up on his residuary leg, "I see none whatever. You are young, healthy, and have the use of all your limbs-the very thing for the army!" I glanced involuntarily at his own contributions to the field. He perceived it, and retorted, "Sir, I know the difference between us as well as if I were the field-surgeon. I should never have advised you to march if you had not limbs enough for the purpose; but you have your complement." "And therefore can afford to lose them, my good uncle," said I. 66 Nephew," was the reply, "sneering is no argument, except among civilians. But if a man wants to climb at once to a name, let him try the army. Have you no estate? why, the regiment is your freehold; have you no education? why, the colour of your coat will stand you in place of it with three-fourths of the men and all the women; have you no brains? why, their absence will never be missed at the mess; and as for the field, not half a dozen in an army ever exhibit any pretensions of the kind." This was too flattering a prospect to be overlooked. I took the advice; in a week was gazetted into a marching regiment, and in another week was on board his Majesty's transport No. 10 with a wing of the gallant thirty regiment, tacking out of Portsmouth on our way to Gibraltar. Military men have it that there are three bad passages -the slow, the quick, and the neither quick nor slow; pronouncing the two former detestable, the latter - the storm making a man sick of the sea; the calm making him sick of himself a much worse thing; and the alternation of calm and storm bringing both sicknesses into one. My first passage was distinguished by being of the third order. found my fellow-subalterns a knot of goodhumoured beings-the boys with the habits of We finally sailed for Egypt; found the men, the men with the tricks of boys-all French building fortifications on the shore; fully impressed with the honour of the epau- and, like a generous enemy, landed just where lette, and thinking the man who wore two they had provided for our reception. But the instead of one the most favoured of all things | world knows all this already, and I disdain to

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man had ever thought but as a lieutenant before, became the centre of a circle—a he bluestocking surrounded with obsequious listeners, by virtue of his pre-eminent knowledge of every wine-house in the garrison. Such is the advantage of situation! Nine-tenths of mankind, till they are placed on the spot of display, what are they but red-nosed lieutenants? At Gibraltar, like Thiebault in Frederic's paradise at Potsdam, we conjugated from morning till night the verb, "Je m'ennuie, tu t'ennuies, il s'ennuie," through all its persons, tenses, and moods. At length we were ordered for Egypt. Never was regiment so delighted. We supped together upon the news, and drank farewell to Gibraltar and confusion to - in bumpers without measure. In the very height of our carousal my eye dropped upon my old friend's red nose. It served me as a kind of thermometer. I observed it diminished of its usual crimson. "The spirit has fallen," thought I; "there is ill luck in the wind." I took him aside, but he was then too far gone for regular counsel; he only clasped my hand with the fervour of a fellow-drinker, and muttered out, lifting his glass with a shaking wrist, "Nothing but confoundedly bad brandy in Egypt for love or money.' We sailed; were shipwrecked on the coast of Caramania, and surrounded by natives. Soldiers are no great geographers; the line leave that business to the staff, the staff to the artillery, the artillery to the engineers, and the engineers to Providence. At our council, which was held on a row of knapsacks, and with one pair of trousers among its seven sages, it was asserted, with equal show of reason, that we were in Africa, in Arabia, in Turkey, and in the Black Sea. However, our sheepskin friends were urgent for our departure.

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man ever forget himself. In our bivouac the thought of the lieutenant came over me: in the heat of the march I could not have thought of anything mortal but my own parched throat and crippled limbs. Absurd as the old subaltern was, I "could have better spared a better man.' We had been thrown together in some strange ways, and as the result of my meditations I determined to return and see what was become of the man with the red nose. Leave was easily obtained, for there was something of the odd feeling for him that a regiment has for one of those harmless madmen who sometimes follow its drums in a ragged uniform and formidable hat and feather. It was lucky for the lieutenant that I rode hard, for I found him as near a premature exit as ever hero was. A working-party had already made his last bed in the sand, and he was about to take that possession which no ejectment will disturb, when I felt some throbbing about his heart. The soldiers insisted that as they were ordered out for the purpose of inhuming, they should go through with their work. But if they were sullen, I was resolute; and I prevailed to have the subject deferred to the hospital. After an infinity of doubt I saw my old friend set on his legs again. But my labour seemed in vain;

tell what everybody knows. But the world does not know that we had three councils of war to settle whether the troops should land in gaiters or trousers, and whether they should or should not carry three days' pipe-clay and blacking in their knapsacks. The most valuable facts are, we see, often lost for want of our being a little behind the curtain. The famous landing was the noisiest thing conceivable. The world at a distance called it the most gallant thing, and I have no inclination to stand up against universal opinion. But whether we were fighting against the sandhills, or the French, or the sun in his strength; whether we were going to the right, or the left, or the rear; whether we were beating or beaten, no living man could have told in two minutes after the first shot. It was all clamour, confusion, bursting of shells, dashing of water, splitting of boats, and screams of the wounded, the whole passing under a coverlet of smoke as fuliginous as ever rushed from furnace. Under this "blanket of the dark" we pulled on, landed, fought, and conquered; and for our triumph, had every man his length of excellent sand for the night, the canopy of heaven for his tent, and the profoundest curses of the commissariat for his supper. On we went day after day, fighting the French, starv-life was going out; the doctors prohibited the ing, and scorching, till we found them in our bottle; and the lieutenant felt, like Shylock, camp before daybreak on the memorable 21st that his life was taken away when that was of March. We fought them there as men fight taken "by which he did live." He resigned in the pit of a theatre, every one for himself. himself to die with the composure of an ancient The French, who are great tacticians, and philosopher. The night before I marched for never fight but for science sake, grew tired Cairo I sat an hour with him. He was a before John Bull, who fights for the love of the changed man, talked more rationally than I thing. The Frenchman fights but to man- had believed within the possibility of brains so œuvre, the Englishman manoeuvres but to many years adust with port, expressed some fight. So, as manoeuvring was out of the rough gratitude for my trouble about him, and question, we carried the affair all after our finally gave me a letter to some of his relatives own hearts. But this victory had its price, in England. The regiment was on its march for it cost the army its brave old general, and at daybreak; we made our way to Cairo, took it cost me my old red-nosed lieutenant. We possession, wondered at its filth, admired its were standing within half a foot of each other, grand mosque, execrated its water, its proviin front of the little ruin where the French sions, and its population; were marched back Invincibles made a last struggle; they fired a to storm Alexandria (where I made all possible volley before they threw themselves on their search for the lieutenant, but in vain); were knees, according to the national custom of saved the trouble by the capitulation of the earning their lives, when I saw my unlucky French; were embarked, landed at Portsmouth friend tumbled head over heels, and stretched just one year from our leaving it, and, as it between my legs. There was no time for pleased the wisdom of Napoleon and the folly thinking of him then. The French were hunt- of our ministry, were disbanded. I had no ed out, la bayonette dans le cul; we followed, reason to complain, for though I had been the battle of Alexandria was won, and our shipwrecked and starved, sick and wounded, I part of the success was to be marched ten miles had left neither my life nor my legs behind. off to look after some of their fragments of Others had been less lucky, and from the losses baggage. We found nothing, of course; for in the regiment I was now a captain. One meither in defeat nor in victory does the French- | day in looking over the relics of my baggage,

after having had a carbine-load of balls discharged one night through his door, he thought it advisable to leave the neighbourhood of his intended father-in-law. I am not about to astonish the world, and throw unbelief on my true story, by saying that the lieutenant has since drank of nothing but the limpid spring. Whatever were his Mussulman habits, he resumed his native tastes with the force of nature. Port still had temptations for him; but prudence, in the shape of the matron sister and the pretty nieces, was at hand, and, like Sancho's physician, the danger and the glass vanished at a sign from those gentle magicians. Our chief anxiety arose from the good-fellowship of the colonel. He had settled within a field of us, and his evenings were spent by our fireside. He had been, by the chances of service, once on campaign with the lieutenant; and all campaigners know that there is no free-mason sign of friendship equal to that of standing to be shot at together. But there was an unexpected preservative in this hazardous society. The colonel was incapable of exhibiting in the centre of his countenance that living splendour which made Falstaff raise Bardolph to the honour of his admiral; he could "carry no lantern in his poop." If envy could have invaded his generous soul it would have arisen at the old restored distinction of his comrade. He watched over his regimen, kept him to the most judicious allowance of claret; and the red nose of the lieutenant never flamed again.

a letter fell out: it was the red-nosed lieuten- | But African offence is a formidable thing; and ant's. My conscience reproached me, and I believe for the moment my face was as red as his nose. I delivered the letter; it was received by a matron at the head of three of the prettiest maidens in all Lancashire, the country of beauty-a blonde, a brunette, and a younger one who was neither, and yet seemed alternately both. I liked the blonde and the brunette infinitely, but the third I did not like, for I fell in love with her, which is a very different thing. The lieutenant was her uncle, and regretted as his habits were, this family circle had much to say for his generosity. Mary's hazel eyes made a fool of me, and I asked her hand that they might make a fool of no one else. The colonel without the nose was of course invited to the wedding, and he was in such exultation that either the blonde or the brunette might have been my aunt if she pleased. But they exhibited no tendency to this gay military Torso, and the colonel was forced to content himself with the experience of his submissive nephew. The wedding-day came, and the three sisters looked prettier than ever in their vestal white. The colonel gave the bride away, and in the tears and congratulations of this most melancholy of all happy ceremonies Mary chose her fate. We returned to dinner, and were seated, all smiles, when the door opened, and in walked-the red-nosed lieutenant! Had I seen, like Brutus, "the immortal Julius' ghost," I could not have been more amazed. But nature was less doubting. The matron threw herself into his arms; the blonde and the brunette clasped each a hand; and my bright-eyed wife forgot the conjugal duties, and seemed to forget that I was in the world. There was indeed some reason for doubt: the man before us was fat and florid enough, but the essential distinction of his physiognomy had lost its regal hue. All this, however, was explained by degrees. After my departure for Cairo he had been given over by the doctors; and sick of taking physic, and determining to die in his own way, he had himself carried up the Nile. The change of air did something for him-the absence of the doctors perhaps more. domesticated himself among the peasants above the cataracts, drank camel's milk, ate rice, wore a haick, and rode a buffalo. Port was inaccessible, and date-brandy was not to his taste. Health forced itself on him; and the sheik of the district began to conceive so good an opinion of the stranger that he offered him his daughter, with a handsome portion of buf- remarkable as being one from which the author of faloes, in marriage. The offer was declined.

He

DR. MAGINN.

THE WALL-FLOWER.1

"Why loves my flower, the sweetest flower
That swells the golden breast of May,
Thrown rudely o'er this ruin'd tower,
To waste the solitary day?

"Why, when the mead, the spicy vale,
The grove and genial garden call,
Will she her fragrant soul exhale
Unheeded on the lonely wall?

"For never sure was beauty born,

To live in death's deserted shade!
Come, lovely flower, my banks adorn,

My banks for life and beauty made."

1 From Langhorne's Fables of Flora. This piece is

Waverley has taken several of his mottoes.

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"Nor deem that flower the garden's foe, Or fond to grace this barren shade; "Tis nature tells her to bestow

Her honours on the lonely dead.

"For this, obedient zephyrs bear

Her light seeds round yon turret's mould, And undispers'd by tempests there, They rise in vegetable gold.

"Nor shall thy wonder wake to see

Such desert scenes distinction crave; Oft have they been, and oft shall be Truth's, honour's, valour's, beauty's grave.

"Where longs to fall that rifted spire, As weary of th' insulting air; The poet's thought, the warrior's fire, The lover's sighs are sleeping there. "When that, too, shades the trembling ground, Borne down by some tempestuous sky, And many a slumbering cottage round

Startles-how still their hearts will lie!

"Of them who, wrapp'd in earth so cold,

No more the smiling day shall view, Should many a tender tale be told;

For many a tender thought is due.

"Hast thou not seen some lover pale,

When ev'ning brought the pensive hour, Step slowly o'er the shadowy vale,

And stop to pluck the frequent flower? "Those flowers he surely meant to strew On lost affection's lowly cell, Tho' there, as fond remembrance grew,Forgotten from his hand they fell. "Has not for thee the fragrant thorn

Been taught her first rose to resign? With vain but pious fondness borne, To deck thy Nancy's honour'd shrine!

"Tis nature pleading in the breast,

Fair memory of her works to find; And when to fate she yields the rest, She claims the monumental mind.

"Why, else, the o'ergrown paths of time
Would thus the letter'd sage explore,
With pain these crumbling ruins climb,
And on the doubtful sculpture pore?
"Why seeks he with unwearied toil
Through death's dim walk to urge his way
Reclaim his long-asserted spoil,
And lead oblivion into day?"

AT THE SHRINE.

Teresa Berini was the daughter of an innkeeper in one of the little villages that lie along the foot of the Sabine Hills. She had been a gay and spirited young woman, and had had her own share of lovers. Had she been as conscientious in confessing the peccadilloes which she had slid into by the necessity for what she had come to deem a little guileless deceit towards rivals, as she was in acknowledging terribly vicious thoughts and desires, she would have been at confession even oftener than she was. The priest, Padre Androvi, a shrewd and active man, who knew more about the affairs of the young women of the village than he chose to acknowledge in their hearing, would sit with eyes apparently confession, only now and then putting a quiet half-closed, as in a dream, listening to Teresa's question calculated to draw forth more detailed admissions. At length he would wind up by saying to her

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My daughter, such thoughts as these come to all of us unbidden. If we entertain them not, the church, like a good mother, freely absolves without rebuke. It is only when they are hospitably provided for, and try to pay us for such entertainment as we give them by urging us to falseness or cruelty of act or word, that they are in danger of becoming deadly. Go in peace, my daughter, and forget not to pray for counsel and help to our sacred mother Mary."

Now, over and over again had the padre dismissed Teresa in this wise. And she would go straight from confession to deceive a lover; for it must be known that, as the daughter of Jacopo Berini, she was esteemed a prize worth striving for among the young men of the district. Jacopo having conducted the inn with shrewdness and economy for nearly half a lifetime, and having at the same time looked very sharply after a mulberry-yard, and always sold his silk well, was a man of some means; and

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