is restored between us. Our eighteen hundred peace commissioners have no occasion to open their mouths; and the little question of confiscation is postponed. Messrs. Battery, Broadway, and Co., of New York, have the kindness to sell my Saginaws for what they will fetch. I shall lose half my loaf very likely; but for the sake of a quiet life, let us give up a certain quantity of farinaceous food; and half a loar, you know, is better than no bread at all. THE NOTCH ON THE AXE. A STORY À LA MODE. PART I. "EVERY one remembers in the Fourth Book of the immortal poem of your Blind Bard (to whose sightless orbs no doubt Glorious Shapes were apparent, and Visions Celestial) how Adam discourses to Eve of the Bright Visitors who hovered round their Eden 'Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.' ! "How often,' says Father Adam, 'from the steep of echoing hill or thicket, have we heard celestial voices to the midnight air, sole, or responsive to each other's notes, singing After the Act of Disobedience, when the erring pair from Eden took their solitary way, and went forth to toil and trouble on common earth though the Glorious Ones no longer were visible, you cannot say they were gone. It was not that the Bright Ones were absent, but that the dim eyes of rebel man no longer could see them. In your chamber hangs a picture of one whom you never knew, but whom you have long held in tenderest regard, and who was painted for you by a friend of mine, the Knight of Plympton. She communes with you. She smiles on you. When your spirits are low, her bright eyes shine on you and cheer you. Her innocent sweet smile is a caress to you. She never fails to soothe you with her speechless prattle. You love her. She is alive with you. As you extinguish your candle and turn to sleep, though your eyes sec her not, is she not there still smiling? As you lie in the night awake, and thinking of your duties, and the morrow's inevitable toil oppressing the busy, weary, wakeful brain as with a remorse, the crackling fire flashes up for a moment in the grate, and she is there, your little Beauteous Maiden, smiling with her sweet eyes! When moon is down, when fire is out, when curtains are drawn, when lids are closed, is she not there, the little Beautiful One, though invisible, present and smiling still? Friend the Unseen Ones are round about us. Does it not seem as if the time were drawing near when it shall be given to men to behold them?" The print of which my friend spoke and which, indeed, hangs in my room though he has never been there, is that charming little winter piece of Sir Joshua, representing the littl Lady Caroline Montague, afterward Duchess of Buccleuch. She is repre sented as standing in the midst of a winter landscape, wrapped in muff and cloak; and she looks out of her picture with a smile so exquisite that a Herod could not see her withou being charmed. "I beg your pardon, Mr. PINTO,' I said to the person with whom 1 was conversing. (I wonder, by the way, that I was not surprised at his knowing how fond I am of this print.) 'You spoke of the Knight of Plympton. Sir Joshua died, 1792: and you say he was your dear friend?" As I spoke I chanced to look at Mr. Pinto; and then it suddenly struck me: Gracious powers! Perhaps you are a hundred years old, now I think of it. You look more than a hundred. Yes, you may be a thousand years old for what I know. Your teeth are false. One eye is Pinto passed a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his awful white teeth, and kept his glass eye steadily fixed on me. "Sir Joshua's friend?" said he (you perceive, eluding my direct question). "Is not every one that knows his pictures Reynolds's friend? Suppose I tell you that I have been in his painting room scores of times, and that his sister Thé has made me tea, and his sister Toffy has made coffee for me? You will only say I am an old ombog.' (Mr. Pinto, I remarked, spoke all languages with an accent equally foreign.) "Suppose I tell you that I knew Mr. Sam Johnson, and did not like him that I was at that very ball at Madame Cornelis's, which you have mentioned in one of your little دو what do you call them?-bah! my memory begins to fail me—in one of your little Whirligig Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been here, in this very room? "Have you, then, had these apartments for -more- than seventy years?" I asked. They look as if they had not been swept for that time don't they? Hey? I did not say that I had them for seventy years, but that Sir Joshua has visited me here." "When?" I asked, eying the man sternly, for I began to think he was an impostor. He answered me with a glance still more stern: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was here this very morning, with Angelica Kaufmann and Mr. Oliver Goldschmidt. He is still very much attached to Angelica, who still does not care for him. Because he is dead Perhaps some of my readers remember a paper of which the figure of a man carrying a barrel formed the initial letter, and which I copied from an old spoon now in my possession. As I looked at Mr. Pinto I'do declare he looked so like the figure on that old piece of plate that I started and felt very uneasy. "Ha!" said he, laughing through his false teeth (I declare they were false I could see utterly toothless gums working up and down behind the pink coral), you see I wore a beard den; I am shafed now; perhaps you tink I am a spoon. Ha, ha!” And as he laughed he gave a cough which I thought would have coughed his teeth out, his glass eye out, his wig off, his very head off; but he stopped this convulsion by stumping across the room and seizing a little bottle of bright pink medicine, which, being opened, spread a singular acrid aromatic odor through the apartment; and I thought I saw — - but of this I cannot take an affirmation- a light green and violet flame flickering round the neck of the phial as he opened it. By the way, from the peculiar stumping noise which he made in crossing the bare-boarded apartment, I knew at once that my strange entertainer had a wooden leg. Over the dust which lay quite thick on the boards, you could see | he shook his hand once, twice, thrice, the mark of one foot very neat and at me, and glared at me out of his eye pretty, and then a round O, which was in a peculiar, way. naturally the impression made by the wooden stump. I own I had a queer thrill as I saw the mark, and felt a comfort that it was not cloven. Of what happened now I protest I cannot give an accurate account. It seemed to me that there shot a flame from his eye into my brain, whilst behind his glass eye there was a green illumination as if a candle had been In this desolate apartment in which Mr. Pinto had invited me to see him, there were three chairs, one bottom-lit in it. It seemed to me that from less, a little table on which you might put a breakfast-tray, and not a single other article of furniture. In the next room, the door of which was open, I could see a magnificent gilt dressing-case, with some splendid diamond and ruby shirt-studs lying by it, and a chest of drawers, and a cupboard apparently full of clothes. Remembering him in Baden Baden in great magnificence, I wondered at his present denuded state. "You have a house elsewhere, Mr. Pinto ? " I said. ، There is, then, a sleeping-room beyond?" "This is the sleeping-room." (He pronounces it dis. Can this, by the way, give any clew to the nationality of this singular man?) “If you sleep on these two old chairs you have a rickety couch; if on the floor, a dusty one.' 66 ور his long fingers two quivering flames he, "it is the smell of my medicine. ، | "You said you were going to dine at the Gray's-inn Coffee-house," " Suppose I sleep up dere?" said he said. I was. I often dine there. this strange man, and he actually There is excellent wine at the pointed up to the ceiling. I thought “ Gray's-inn Coffee-house; but I him mad, or what he himself called declare I NEVER SAID SO. I was not 'an ombog." "I know. You do astonished at his remark; no more not believe me; for why should I astonished than if I was in a dream. deceive you? I came but to propose Perhaps I was in a dream. Is life a a matter of business to you. I told dream? Are dreams facts? Is sleepyou I could give you the clew to the ing being really awake? I don't mystery of the Two Children in Black, know. I tell you I am puzzled. I whom you met at Baden, and you|have read“The Woman in White,” If I told you, you came to see me. ، The Strange Story - not to menwould not believe me. What for try tion that story Stranger than Ficand convinz you? Ha hey?" And tion" in "The Cornhill Magazine”. that story for which THREE credible | crispe for a moment. Then he looked witnesses are ready to vouch. I have steadily towards one of those great had messages from the dead; and not porcelain stools which you see in only from the dead, but from people gardens and it seemed to mewho never existed at all. I own II tell you I won't take my affidavitam in a state of much bewilderment; I may have been maddened by the but, if you please, will proceed with six glasses I took of that pink elixir my simple, my artless story. - I may have been sleep-walking: perhaps am as I write now-I may have been under the influence of that astounding MEDIUM into whose hands I had fallen-but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly grin at the porcelain stool, Well, then. We passed from Shepherd's Inn into Holborn, and looked for a while at Woodgate's bric-a-brac shop, which I never can pass without delaying at the windows-indeed, if I were going to be hung, I would beg the cart to stop, and let me have one look more at that delightful omnium gatherum. And passing Woodgate's, we come to Gale's little shop, No. 47," which is also a favorite haunt of mine. Mr. Gale happened to be at his door, and as we exchanged salutations," Mr. Pinto," I said, "will you like to see a real curiosity in this curiosity shop? Step into Mr. Gale's little back room." In that little back parlor there are Chinese gongs; there are old Saxe and Sêvres plates; there is Fürstenberg, Carl Theodor, Worcester, Amstel, Nankin and other jimcrockery. And in the corner what do you think there is? There is an actual GUILLOTINE. If you doubt me, go and see - Gale, High Holborn, No. 47. It is a slim instrument, much slighter than those which they make now; -some nine feet high, narrow, a pretty piece of upholstery enough. There is the hook over which the rope used to play which unloosened the dreadful axe above; and look! dropped into the orifice where the head used to gothere is THE AXE itself, all rusty, with A GREAT NOTCH IN THE BLADE. man sitting on the porcelain stool, with his head in his lap, your ordinarily benevolent features" (this I confess was a bouncer, for between ourselves a more sinister and ill-looking rascal than Mons. P. I have seldom set eyes on)" your ordinarily handsome face wore an expression that was by no means pleasing. You grinned at the individual just as you did at me when you went up to the cei—, pardon me as I thought you did, when I fell down in a fit in your chambers; " and I qualified my words in a great flutter and tremble; I did not care to offend the I did not dare to offend the man. I thought once or twice of jumping into a cab, and flying; of taking refuge in Day and Martin's Blacking Warehouse; of speaking to a policeman, but not one would come. I was this man's slave. I followed him like his dog. I could not get away from him. So, you see, I went on meanly conversing with him, and affecting a simpering confidence. I remember when I was a little boy at school, going up fawning and smiling in this way to some great hulking bully of a sixth-form boy. So I said in a word, "Your ordinarily handsome face wore a disagreeable expression," &c. 66 دو "In black satin breeches and striped stockings; a white piqué waistcoat, a gray coat, with large metal buttons, and his hair in powder. He must have worn a pigtail-only". Ha, ha, "Only it was cut off! ha!" Mr. Pinto cried, yelling a laugh, which I observed made the policemen stare very much. "Yes. It was cut off by the same blow which took off the scoundrel's head-ho, ho, ho! And he made a circle with his hooknailed finger round his own yellow neck, and grinned with a horrible triumph. "I promise you that fellow was surprised when he found his head in the pannier. Ha ha! Do you ever cease to hate those whom you hate?" fire flashed terrifically from his glass eye, as he spoke - or to love dose whom you once loved. Oh, never, never!" And here his natural eye was bedewed with tears. "But here we are at the 'Gray's-inn Coffee-house.' James, what is the joint?" That very respectful and efficient waiter brought in the bill of fare, and I, for my part, chose boiled leg of pork and pease-pudding, which my acquaintance said would do as well as any thing else; though I remarked he only trifled with the pease-pudding, "It is ordinarily very handsome," and left all the pork on the plate. În said he, with such a leer at a couple fact, he scarcely ate any thing. But of passers-by that one of them cried, he drank a prodigious quantity of 'Oh, crikey, here's a precious guy! wine; and I must say that my friend and a child in its nurse's arms, scream- Mr. Hart's port-wine is so good that ed itself into convulsions. Oh, oui, I myself took—well, I should think, che suis très-choli garçon, bien peau, I took three glasses. Yes, three, cercerdainement," continued Mr. Pinto; tainly. He I mean Mr. P.,- the "but you were right. That that old rogue, was insatiable: for we had person was not very well pleased when to call for a second bottle in no time. he saw me. There was no love lost be- When that was gone, my companion tween us, as you say; and the world wanted another. A little red mountnever knew a more worthless mis- ed up to his yellow cheeks as he drank creant. I hate him, voyez-vouz? I the wine, and he winked at it in a hated him alife; I hate him dead. I strange manner. "I remember," hate him man; I hate him ghost: and said he, musing, "when port-wine he know it, and tremble before me. was scarcely drunk in this country If I see him twenty tausend years though the Queen liked it, and so did hence - and why not? I shall hate Harley; but Bolingbroke didn'thim still. You remarked how he was he drank Florence and Champagne. dressed?" Dr. Swift put water to his wine. -- |