sands and surges of our dangerous Eastern coast, hove in sight of her moorings in the Thames; her red funnel, and colossal hull, conspicuous among the forest of masts, that lay hither and thither in the Pool; and her waste steam snorting like a hot steed, that has done its day's work. The captain has relinquished his task of duty: the weather-beaten pilot high amid-ships governs, with a motion of the finger, the majestic Leviathan. Strong men are straining at the helm. The crew crowded in the forecastle are resting from their toils. At halfspeed she threads the labyrinth of smaller craft. At length she is alongside, lashed by huge hawsers to the shore: the restless paddle-wheels cease. And now what a scene is there! Gangways are cleared; wooden stages wheeled aboard to make draw-bridges: great creaking cranes wind and unwind. Then what lowings and bleatings-what concourse of men-what confusion of animals. It is Smithfield let loose on board! Salesmen and cruel tattered drovers strive claiming their cargoes. Oxen in canvass hammocks are swung powerless from the hold. Flocks of long woolled sheep, that a few days since bleated so happily on some remote Highland grazing grounds, are handed over to their murderers, and beaten to the nearest slaughter house. Here are pigmy ponies from Shetland; there pet deer in hutches, destined to adorn some lordly park. Here piles of well-packed game boxes strew the deck. There beautiful dogs in couples that have done their duty on the moors. And here long trough-like cases, fresh from the icehouses of Don and Dee, airtight and full of salmon ! CHAPTER XI. "My home of youth! Oh! if indeed to part And bearing all the glories of our Spring MRS. HEMANS. T is a startling and fearful thing to find ourselves, for the first time, un furling the sails which are to bear us to the ocean of life, and loosing from the well known haven, in which we have, from our earliest years, instinctively and of right, found refuge! A gale may waft us back again, after a distant and perilous voyage, to revel in its shelter for awhile; and we may find room to refit, and all may be going on as heretofore; but we used to in and out, carelessly and of course, and we go used to deem the place our own; but now some other bark is fastened to our moorings, and it is no longer called-our home. If ever thoughts, like these, peopled the pensive brain of any of those many young gentlemen who with neatly brushed paletôt, well polished boots, and gentlemanly hat, wend daily their way Eastward from their West-end lodgings, they were in a peculiar degree those of Harold St. Just, as he sought, after his rambles in the North, with laudable punctuality, the' chambers' of Mr. Macrobius Macer, an eminent conveyancer in Lincoln's Inn, with whom he was installed as pupil for the ensuing year. And truly the beginning of a lawyer's life is a stern and soul-subduing discipline. Even to those who go straight to it from their grammar-school, it is a humbling contrast, but to him who exchanges for it the humanizing career of an University education, it is absolutely crushing. He has been taught to be terse and condensed in his compositions, he is now obliged to frame sheets full of tautological and unpunctuated sentences. He has been trained from childhood to revere the purity of Augustan literature: he is plunged into dog Latin and Norman-French jargon. He has revelled among the melodies of Homer; he must grope through the ponderous realities of Sugden. He has drunk at the fount of Helicon, and soared to the summits of Parnassus: he must descend to the lead-mines of 'Chitty,' and break his heart over Coke upon Littleton.' But all this had to be endured by Harold, as it had been by ten thousand kindred spirits before him. Occasionally indeed he would suggest to his tutor, that ten words need not be employed where one would suffice, that the seller of an estate, for example, should not be forced, by the absolutism of conveyancing, to'grant, bargain, alien, release, and confirm,' instead of simply' selling' it; and that the mortgagor of an estate should not always be made to promise to pay at a day certain the debt which he never intends to pay on that day at all. But in all his remarks he was silenced by Mr. Macer's dictatorial and somewhat indigestible reply, that |