was our own man we had been all the time watching and abusing. He had been punctual to the time fixed, but the better to shelter himself and dogs he had removed to a different spot, thinking that as we must see him, though at a distance, we should come to him, as soon as we deemed the weather would allow of our sporting. Thus, for three mortal hours had we-drenched with rain, cross, cold, and in despair of getting any sporting-been watching our own keeper, believing him. all the time to have been our neighbour's. Shortly after we had begun shooting, the other keeper duly made his appearance; but a civil mes sage to his master, and a sovereign for himself, settled the matter at once; the keeper merely fired his gun off in the air, made the claim, pocketed the sovereign, wished us good sport, and took our message to his master, leaving the moor undisturbed to us. We found the grouse

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strong and pretty plentiful, and though my host was a most hasty and consequently bad shot, he invariably made a point of claiming one bird, let it drop where it would. On one occasion he made his usual claim for one of the two birds I had killed, and appealed to his keeper, who, giving one of those peculiar grins which intimated his words differed from his thoughts, said his master had killed it; however, the doubt was easily removed by my asking my friend just to put his ramrod down his gun, which proved to be still loaded, it having missed fire-of which probably he was fully aware, but thought I was not. Whether this discovery had any effect upon his subsequent intentions towards me I cannot say, but shortly afterwards, happening to spy a hare in her form, quite to my right, and my friend being a few yards off on my left, I inquired, "Do you shoot hares here?" thinking of his harriers at the time. The moment I spoke, up jumped the hare, and bang went my friend's gun, his charge of shot passing me like a ball, not six inches from my breast. The heavy fog and smoke enveloped us both for a short time, during which I could hear him, in a low voice, anxiously inquiring from the keeper, who stood a little behind and nearer to me, Have I killed him?" As the smoke cleared off, I saw my friend standing with his gun dropped between his hands, the but resting upon the ground, himself motionless and horrified, and his face pale as the very death he thought he had inflicted upon me; however, perceiving he had missed me and the hare, he proposed an immediate adjournment home; a suggestion which, considering his disappointment, I thought it best to accede to without remonstrance. We therefore left off shooting, and returned home with six and a-half brace of grouse, preparatory to the rest of our party setting forth to other and better preserved moors, nearly adjoining those we had left, and which we should have to recross in our way. After breakfasting and returning thanks to Providence for my narrow escape, our host went with one of the party to the same moor to pick up the scattered birds; but disagreeing, and the weather being very hot, they separated, and eventually lay down, and went to sleep on the heath, returning at last without a bird between them. I accompanied an elderly sportsman, one of our party, to the adjoining moors; but the sun was then full out, there was no scent, and the heather had become slippery and exceedingly hot to the feet. These things, and the previous night's anxiety of my companion, also an invalid, caused him very soon to decline shoot

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ing; and although I allowed him, as I was bound in courtesy to do, to take every shot, he killed but two or three birds, and I had foreborne almost to shoot at all. Fatigued and disappointed, at 12 o'clock, he left me and the keeper to proceed with an excellent brace of young dogs to conclude the sport. It fortunately happened that a neighbour was shooting also close to me, he beating down wind to get round a hill, while I was doing so upward; the consequence was, that no end of grouse came gliding over a small valley which separated us from his ground into my beat. And after using all the powder I had left, I took the keeper's flint-lock gun, killed a brace of grouse, and then was obliged to desist from further shooting for want of ammunition, it being too far off to send for more, as I had promised to be shortly at home after the old gentleman's departure, although, when I was thus obliged to leave off shooting, the dogs were then standing at a pack of grouse, and eight other packs were marked down but a short distance before me. The result of my day's sport, which terminated by 3 o'clock, was nineteen and a-half brace of grouse and one hare, and these I was fortunate enough to bag out of 42 shots; and I really believe, had I had ammunition, I could easily have killed 20 brace more. The gun I shot with was unequalled, and even Colonel Thornton's celebrated gun, Death," must have succumbed to it, no distance seemed too far for it to kill at. It was a gun made by old Gulley, who, not being able to make me a new one within the time I required, had altered a second-hand one of his own, browned and done it up, so that it had all the appearance of an entire new gun, but for which I paid him, including a case, only 16 guineas. So much was said about the unrivalled powers of this gun, that upon a wager being made in the evening between two of our party, my gun was to be brought into requisition, and its qualities tested. The next day this was done, and I begged to see the shooting, and load my own gun. We were accompanied by many of the tenantry on horse-back, two keepers, besides other lookers-on. The result was, that my gun won the match, and the shooting of it, I must say, was truly wonderful: nothing seemed capable of escaping, and like the railroads, it seemed to annihilate distances." Over our claret in the ensuing evening, the shooting and the gun were further discussed; and at length, after many refusals to sell the gun, I had a cheque written out and handed over to me for £100: this I pocketed, and kept safe for some time; but that troublesome thing, conscience, getting the better of me (for I never intended actually to retain such a sum for a gun), I tore up the cheque upon condition the drawer of it paid Gulley for making me another gun as similar to it as he could, which he afterwards did for 36 guineas: but it did not prove equal to the former, neither did I ever see one that at all approached it. I may here mention that I had once the same sum offered me for a setter, by an old clergyman almost past shooting at the time, but who stated he should like to say before he died that he had possessed the best sporting dog he had ever seen run. She was a very small, beautifully made bitch, and unequalled in speed and nose-every thing that a dog could do she did. For the same reason this gentleman offered so large a sum, I declined it. But my little favourite died not long afterwards, from mismanagement at a particular time in my

absence. On one of our day's grouse shooting, our host ordered a barrel of ale to be tapped, which he had had especially brewed a twelvemonth before on purpose for me, and kept ready against my arrival, as I came from a very zealous ale-drinking country. When we tasted my host's clear amber-coloured ale, it seemed to smack of salt to such an unaccountable degree, one might have fancied Lot's wife had got into it, for it was perfectly undrinkable; and, upon inquiry, it turned out that, in order to make it keep, "it had been brewed with salt water"-even the pigs declined it, and it was all thrown away. Buttermilk was the beverage generally used by the common people in the neighbourhood, and spirits from the adjacent sea-coast by all those who could get them.

"Fiddle faddle! Don't tell me this and that and everything in the world, but give me the mathematical demonstration."

CONGREVE.

The moral world, by which is meant all the men and women who have escaped being found out, treat virtue as if it were an abstract property. The law of the land does the same by crime; and stealing a loaf is punished by statute in the same degree, whether the thief be starving at the time, or returning from a dinner at the Lord Mayor's. There is a capital commentary on this in a story which I have somewhere heard or read. The rector of a rural parish, in returning from divine service, is supposed to overtake an industrious labourer, who was a constant attendant at worship every Sabbath. "Well, Master Jackson," says the parson, "Sunday must be a blessed day for you, who work so hard all the week; and you make good use of it too, for I never, by any chance, miss you from church." Aye, sir," replies Jackson, "it is, indeed, a blessed day, for I works hard enough all the week; and when Sunday comes, I goes to church, and sets me down, and lays my legs up, and thinks of nothing!" If we could analyze the criminal sta

tistics of this or any other country, we should find the offences grow and spread upon as natural principles as animal or vegetable existence. A young gentleman, who figured at one of the police offices, not long ago, for robbing his master, wrote to acknowledge the theft, and thus reasoned upon his tendency for larceny :-" Circumstances, over which human beings have no control, made me what I am. What I might have been, had I not been born the son of the most drunken monster ever a poor devil had for a father, I dare not think about, or it would make me mad. The jade, Fortune, sent me into the world, the offspring of a rascally pawnbroker; and that scoundrel took care I should never rise higher in the social scale." There are, indeed, many and eminent exceptions to the rule; but such rule is, nevertheless, founded on a principle as sure as that effect comes of cause. The highway has been the resource of cavaliers in difficulties ere now, and pockets have been picked, so as almost to make the act an obligation conferred upon the party relieved of his purse; but for one Gentleman George to insinuate a wish to borrow your gold by the light of the moon, or one Mr. Barrington to seduce your diamond pin out of your neckcloth, there are thousands who rifle you first, and then give you a knock over the pate, by way of clenching the bargain.

As nature is pretty regular in the order and amount of her productions, now that the road has ceased to offer a source of gentlemanly revenue to persons born with no estates and souls above buttons, their category would be a desperate one, but for the turf. Your ill-mannerly thief does now as he has done from the beginning, and ever shall do: he robs in a slovenly, unhandsome manner, and, as his due, gets the gallies or gallows, according to his principle of doing business. But to the poor gentleman-for whom Hounslow Heath no longer stands in stead of the dirty acres, or Bath as a market in which live stock may be had on his own terms-nothing would have remained but a life of ignominious industry, had not the ring started up as a panacea for his poverty. It needed not for him to be born a conjuror to perceive that the career of a Leg was such an improvement on the life of the most distinguished highwayman, as has not been dreamt of in the philosophy of freebooting. It was no small thing to be able to substitute a pencil for a pistol, and noon-day at Ascot for midnight at Bagshot: but when added to this was association with the nobles of the land, and a peace of mind that not even the organization of the new police could disturb, what wonder was it that the man of slender means and pliable conscience looked upon the institution of the betting ring as the commencement of his millennium? Every member of that extensive community, however, is not born with as much brains as ambition. The supply, limited, it should seem, in the most populous nations, is rarely over a few hundreds. Of these, here and there a few have managed to secure temporary thrones-one or two to make a fee simple of a sceptre, while some become dignitaries of Church and State, popes, prime ministers, and what not; but the majority go forth in search of their fortunes, and find them in the capacity of chevaliers d' industrie, as rogues of enterprise and spirit are politely designated by the French people. Leatherlungs, as we have seen long since, was by birth ultra-canaille: he was also clever in a higher degree. It was his good hap to be produced pretty

far north, and chance still further favoured his opportunities by throwing him in continual juxta-position with the citizens of modern Athens. He used to furnish slippers and boot-jack to a traveller's room, chiefly frequented by bagmen from Auld Reekie. Perhaps he was born a philosopher as well as penniless; if so, like one who reformed the system of that class of theorists, he had no inclination to employ himself in labours resembling those of the damned in Grecian Tartarus, to spin for ever on the same wheel round the same point-to gape for ever after the same deluding theories-to pour water for ever into the same bottomless buckets, or to pace for ever to and fro on the same wearisome path, after the same revolving stone.

We must not, nevertheless, fall into the vulgar error formerly entertained about the great Bacon, that he had invented some new method of arriving at truth, or "the rights of a thing," as it is called in the vulgar tongue. He merely turned to effective account the method which had been practised ever since the beginning of the world-as we are assured-by every human being. It is constantly practised by the most ignorant clown-the most thoughtless schoolboy-by the very child at the breast. That method is known in philosophy as the inductive, whereby the clown arrives at the conclusion that, if he sows barley, he shall not reap wheat-whereby the schoolboy knows that a cloudy day is the best for catching trout-whereby the infant is taught to expect milk from his mother or his nurse, and none from his father. Leatherlungs had probably never heard of Aristotle, but he had constantly heard, in the travellers' room, some fellow looking like a lazaret of bile, remark, in this wise-"I ate minced pies on Monday and Wednesday, and I was kept awake by indigestion all night. I did not eat any on Tuesday or Friday, and I was quite well; I ate very sparingly of them on Sunday, and was very slightly indisposed in the evening; but, on Christmas day, I almost dined on them, and was so ill that I was in great danger. It cannot have been the brandy I took with them, for I have drunk brandy daily for years, without being the worse for it." The bilious fellow then declares the mince pies to have been the cause of his dyspepsia. Leatherlungs had come to the conclusion before the patient had come to the first foresight of his deductions. Now a volume, difficult to translate, might be written to show that philosophy was at the bottom of all the clever moves made by the Leg in life. What doos it matter about the cause? William Tell, we are told, would not have been one whit more likely to cleave the apple, if he had known that his arrow would describe a parabola under the influence of the attraction of the earth, nor Captain Barclay to have walked a thousand miles in a thousand hours, if he had known the place and name of every muscle in his legs. The Leg was a heaven-inspired genius; he got at the root and reason of a thing, though it is unlikely he ever heard of a syllogism in his life, or would have understood the meaning of it if he had. I assume for my hero some inspiration because, though, as I have shown, all men are constantly drawing inferences, as it were, instinctively, the majority arrive at weak or impotent conclusions. Thus, while the inductive process led Franklin to discover the nature of lightning, it has induced multitudes, in later days, to believe in mesmerism, Leatherlungs was born with a wooden spoon in his mouth-the Earl of Little

very