that the fatal hour had come, at last, when we should have to part, perhaps for ever. I looked at my poor old watch. It had stopped. The fact is, the little thing was stunned. The numerals had tears of terror in their eyes; and it held out its tiny hands for protection,—like a frightened child, flying to its mother from a strange tumult. I felt sorry for the little thing; and I rubbed the case with my coat sleeve, and then wound it gently up, by way of encouragement; and—the grateful, willing creature-it only missed about half a dozen beats or so, and then began ticking again, in a subdued way, as if it was afraid of being overheard by the tremendous visitor who had so furiously disturbed "the even tenor of its way." The whole house was fairly aroused; tables, chairs, pictures, all were in a state of extraordinary wonderment. The cat was the only thing that kept its senses. It rose from the hearth, and yawned, and stretched itself; and then it came and rubbed its glossy fur soothingly against my leg, and whispered, "All serene! Don't faint!" In the meantime, I could imagine that rap,- -as soon as it had delivered the summons, listening joyfully outside, and saying to itself, with a chuckle, "I've wakened that lot up, for once!"

At

last I mustered courage, and, shaking myself together, I went to the door.

A little, wiry old man stood at the door. His clothing was whole, but rough, and rather dirty. An old cloth cap was on his grey head; and he was in a state of curious disorder from head to toe. He had no braces on; and he was holding his trousers up with one hand. I couldn't tell what to make of him. He was a queer-looking mortal; and he had evidently "been dining," as the upper ten thousand say when any of their own set get drunk. At the first glance, I thought he was begging; but I soon changed my mind about that, for the hardy little fellow stood bolt upright, and there was not the shadow of anything like cringing or whining about him. The little fellow puzzled He looked foggy and dirty; but he had an unmistakable air of work and rugged independence. Steadying himself with one hand against the door-cheek, he muttered something that I couldn't make out.

me.

"Well; what is it?” said I.

Again he muttered something that sounded like "Knocked Up;" to which I mildly replied that he certainly looked as if he

was so; and then I inquired what I could do for him; but, to my astonishment, this seemed to vex him. At last I found that he was a Knocker-Up, and that he had called for his week's "brass." I saw at once that the old man was astray; and the moment I told him where he was, his eyes seemed to fill with a new light, and he exclaimed, "By th' mon, aw'm i'th wrang street!" And then, holding his trousers up, still, with one hand, away he ran, and was no more seen by me.

TO THE EDITor of the WEEKLY GROWL. IR,-I am a nuisance, and therefore I suppose it is right, in the abstract, that I should be put down. Unfortunately, however, many of the persons and things by which I am surrounded are the same to me, and I feel, by fits, vastly inclined to extinguish them, although I know full well, in my sane moments, that they are generally useful. And so it is, right to the end of the piece; everything and everybody is, by turns, a nuisance to everybody and everything else; and if there were no restraint upon the public vanity, and private pique, and officious frivolities which affect these conflicting elements, the whole body politic, being composed of nuisances, would be destroyed, like the Irish cats in the story. In fact, sir, there is nobody in the world that is not a nuisance to somebody; though that is hardly a sufficient reason why they should be allowed to worry one another. But in these days, the art and mystery of grumbling-that native prerogative which has grown up so luxuriantly in the soil of our English freedom, that the grumblers now constitute an eminently valuable power in the state-the art and mystery of grumbling (it really is artful and mysterious sometimes) is now growing into a kind of social scurvy, more annoying than serviceable, and sometimes exceeding in offensiveness the nuisances which it scratches into notice. The contagion is getting to such a pitch just now, that it is time for the nuisances to speak for themselves-for even a nuisance has a right side—and although I myself am one, I shall be grateful if you will allow me-just this once-to say a few words

respecting the treatment to which many of my humbler brethren are subjected by the magnates of the tribe. I feel the more hopeful that you will grant this, since I know that I am not the only nuisance to which you have, with admirable forbearance, opened the columns of your excellent journal.

Happily, the expression of opinion is so free in this country, that although some offensive persons deny that a nuisance has the slightest right to appeal to any of the senses-I will venture to, assert, backed by all known law and custom, that even a nuisance has a right to be heard—at least, in its own defence; thanks to that instinctive leaning to fair play which, while it deprecates anything that is foul, yet acknowledges that even foulness itself may, sometimes, have a fair side. My dear sir, we nuisances have endured so much, as we may say, from those of our own household, that the patience of the most Christian nuisance in the world must give way under such an incessant fire of impertinent insult. Ah me! there seems to be so little fellow-feeling amongst nuisances now-a-days, that it may be worth while to remind them all of the poet's little sermon beginning,O wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us.

Nuisance-hunters are always, of course, a nuisance to the nuisances; but the hunters are so often worse, upon the whole, than the hunted, that it would be a general benefit to hold up the mirror to these inconsiderate grumblers a little now and then. To whom, then, in this difficulty, can we appeal, but to you, oh Mr. Editor? who are yourself a very rock of offence to some misguided persons; who are, doubtless, a stumbling-block to you.

How the theme widens as one pursues it. There is something comical about the pathology of public grumbling. Is it not a fact well known to you, my dear sir, that there exists an inexhaustible class of persons who, having little or no capacity for distinguishing themselves publicly in any nobler fashion, and fearing, above all things, that obscurity which is their natural destiny, are constantly racking their wits for something to write to the papers about. How many such have you, yourself, sir, out of the sheer kindliness of your nature—not unmixed with a certain sense of the humour of the thing-lent a little fame to, by deigning, occasionally, to embalm their crude frivolities in your own clear "nonpareil" To such persons, anything will

U

serve for a subject, if they can only twist it into the shape of a complaint: strong smells, and strange smells, which are not strong; suspicious loiterers in lonely places; gaslight when the moon shines, and want of gas when a cloud happens to be passing over the moon; flying chips from masons' chisels, which have been stopt in their flight by the rubicund tip of some respectable gentleman's nose; bits of orange peel on the flags; public clocks that are too fast, or too slow, or are stopt altogether, or have their fingers bent, or the faces of which are partly hidden by the encroaching insignia of ambitious pawnbrokers, or are in places where they are not needed, or are not in places where they are needed; pavements which are too slippery for horses, and too rough for ladies; music to people who have no ear for it, and noises to people who have a delicate ear for music, and either to people who like neither; mutually-discordant neighbours; church bells that are not rung, and church bells that are rung too much, and church bells that are not melodious when they are rung; holes in the street, and places where holes are likely to be, sometime; too much water, and too little water; cockle shells; broken pots; the smell of dinners floating up from hotel kitchens; and the inarticulate wails of chip-sellers and fish women; want of loyalty to the crown; want of loyalty to the people; the insolence of cabmen, and railway buffers; sneezing during servicetime; fast-days, proposed by people who are ill with feasting, and feast-days, proposed by people who are ill with fasting; general holidays, proposed by those who are paid for their holidays, and objected to by those who are not paid for them; and a thousand other things, more insignificant even than these; sometimes ferreted out by ingenious old fogies, of an irritable disposition, who go tooting about the streets, “finding things out;" or by young "green" persons, driven to their wits' end by a kind of literary measles. Heaven knows, I do not wish to "freeze the genial current" of such poor souls as these latter, but then, Mr. Editor, we must draw the line somewhere. With respect to the former, have I not seen such a self-elected old nuisance inspector, going slowly along the street, groping with his sharp proboscis for something in the morning air to grumble about in graceful prose, and meeting with a smell which he did not quite understand—a smell which perhaps had travelled “ever so far" before it met him, and was on its way into the country, there to die peaceably upon the general air, if he had only