triumphant memorials contain no account of the sums we are still paying for having waged it.

"The soldiers" and the "milk from the cow" do not at all clash in the minds of boyhood. The juvenile imagination ignores what it pleases, especially as its knowledge is not very great. It no more connects the idea of village massacre with guns and trumpets, than it supposes the fine scarlet coat capable of being ragged and dirty. Virgil may say something about ruined fields, and people compelled to fly for their lives; but this is only part of a "lesson," and the calamities but so many nouns and verbs. The maidservants, and indeed the fair sex in general, till they become wives and mothers, enjoy the like happy exemption from ugly associations of ideas; and the syllabub is taken under the trees, with a delighted eye to the milk on one side, and the military show on the other.

The late Mr. West, the painter, was so pleased with this pastoral group of cows and milk-drinkers in the park, that he went out of the line of his art to make a picture of it.

THE THAMES IN SHAKESPEARE'S TIME

HARRISON: Description of England, in Holinshed's Chronicle (1577)

WHAT should I speak of the fat and sweet salmon, and that in such plenty (after the time of the smelt be passed) as no river in Europe is able to exceed it. What store also of barbel, trout,

chevin,1 perch, smelt, bream, roach, dace, gudgeon, flounder, shrimps, etc., are commonly to be had therein, I refer to them that know by experience better than I, by reason of their daily trade of fishing in the same. And albeit it seemeth from time to time to be as it were defrauded in sundry wise of these large commodities by the insatiable avarice of the fishermen, yet this famous river complaineth commonly of no want; but the more it loseth at one time the more it yieldeth at another. Only in carp it seemeth to be scant, since it is not long since that kind of fish was brought over to England, and but of late to speak of into this stream, by the violent rage of sundry land-floods that brake open the heads and dams of divers gentlemen's ponds, by which means it became somewhat partaker also of this said commodity; whereof once it had no portion that I could ever hear (of). Oh! that this river might be spared but even one year from nets, etc., but alas! then should many a poor man be undone.

In like manner I could intreat of the infinite number of swans daily to be seen upon this river, the two thousand wherries and small boats whereby three thousand poor watermen are maintained, through the carriage and recarriage of such persons as pass or repass from time to time upon the same; besides those huge tide-boats, tilt-boats, and barges, which either carry passengers, or bring necessary provisions from all quarters of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Essex and Kent, unto the city of London.

1 Chevin, or chub. A small freshwater fish.

LANCASHIRE HUMOUR

BY THOMAS NEWBIGGING

I

THE Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Fraser, walking one day along one of the poorer streets in Ancoats, saw two little gutter boys sitting on the edge of the pavement busy, putting the finishing touches to a mud house they had made, and he asked them what they were doing.

"We've been makin' a church," replied one of them.

"A church!" responded the Bishop, much interested, as he stooped over the youthful architects' work. "Ah, yes, I see. That, I suppose, is the entrance door" (pointing with his stick). "This is the nave, these are the aisles, there the pews, and you have even got the pulpit! Very good, my boys, very good. But where is the parson?"

"We ha'not gettin' muck enough to mak' a parson!" was the reply.

II

There is a quaint simplicity about the country people in Lancashire, that wants a name in our vocabulary of manners. It is a simplicity that asserts itself just because of its simplicity, and that never heard, and if it did, never understood "Who's

Who." Imagine the surprise of the new vicar of the parish, fresh from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, accustomed to an agricultural population that smoothed down its forelocks in deference,-imagine him losing his way in one of his parochial excursions, and inquiring in his south-country accent, from a lubberly boy weeding turnips in a field, "Pray, my boy, can you tell me the way to Bolton?"

"Ay," replied the boy. "Yo' mun go across yon bleach croft and into th' loan, and yo'll get to Doffcocker, and then yo're i' th' high road, and yo' can go straight on."

"Thank you," said the vicar, "perhaps I can find it. And now, my boy, will you tell me what you do for a livelihood?"

"I clear up th' shippon, pills potatoes, or does oddin; and if I may be so bou'd, win yo' tell me what yo' do?"

"Oh, I am a minister of the Gospel; I preach the Word of God."

"But what dun yo' do?" persisted the boy.

"I teach you the way of salvation; I show you the road to heaven."

"Nay, nay," said the lad; "dunnot yo' pretend to teach me th' road to heaven, and doesn't know th' road to Bow'ton."

"AULD REEKIE"

BY SIR WALTER SCOTT

(1771-1832)

Sic itur ad astra

Such is the

"THIS is the path to heaven." ancient motto attached to the armorial bearings of the Canongate, and which is inscribed, with greater or less propriety, upon all the public buildings, from the church to the pillory, in the ancient quarter of Edinburgh, which bears, or rather once bore, the same relation to the Good Town that Westminster does to London.

Day after day I walked there, by the side of the kennel which divides the Sanctuary from the unprivileged part of the Canongate; and though the month was July, and the scene the old town of Edinburgh, I preferred it to the fresh air and verdant turf which I might have enjoyed in the King's Park, or to the cool and solemn gloom of the portico which surrounds the palace. Το an indifferent person either side of the gutter would have seemed much the same- -the houses equally mean, the children as ragged and dirty, the carmen as brutal, the whole forming the same picture of low life in a deserted and impoverished quarter of a large city. But to me, the gutter, or kennel, was what the brook Kedron was to Shimei ; death was denounced against him should he cross it, doubtless because it was known to his wisdom