The digital-one finger held out-much used by chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity the high clergy. on taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers-to be taxed no more. There is the shakus rusticus—when your hand is seized in an iron grasp, betokening rude health, warm heart, and distance from the metropolis; but producing a strong sense of relief on your part when you find your hand released and your fingers unbroken. The next to this is the retentive shake-one which, beginning with vigour, pauses as it were to take breath, but without relinquishing its prey, and before you are aware begins again, till you feel anxious as to the result, and have no shake left in you. ON examining some new flowers in the garden, a beautiful girl, who was of the party, exclaimed: "Oh, Mr. Smith, this pea will never come to perfection!" "Permit me then," said he, gently taking her hand and walking towards the plant, "to lead perfection to the pea." MARRIAGE resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing any one. who comes between them. OF Thomas Babington Macaulay, Sydney said: "There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great; he is like a book in breeches." TAXES upon every article which enters the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste; taxes upon warmth, light, and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth, and the waters under the earth; on everything that comes from abroad, or is grown at home; taxes on the raw material; taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite, and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's salt, and the rich man's spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribbons of the bride; at bed and board, couchant or levant, we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon which has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent., makes his will on an eight-pound stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licence of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the HARROGATE is the most heaven-forgotten country under the sun. When I saw it there were only nine mangy fir-trees there; and even they all leaned away from it. My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon. CORNELIUS O'Dowd says that when a friend of his once met Sydney Smith at Brighton, where he had gone to reduce himself, by the use of certain baths in vogue in those days, he was struck by the decrease of Sydney's size, and said, "You are certainly thinner than when I saw you last." "Yes," said he, "I have only been ten days here, but they have scraped enough off me already to make a curate." HE once said, "I remember entering a room with glass all round it at the French embassy, and saw myself reflected on every side. I took it for a meeting of the clergy, and was delighted of course." A LADY complaining that she could not sleep, he said, "I can furnish you with a perfect soporific. I have published two volumes of sermons; take them up to bed with you. I recommended them once to Blanko White, and before he got to the third page he was fast asleep!" DON'T you know, as the French say, there are three sexes-men, women, and clergymen ? THE missionaries complain of intolerance. A weasel might as well complain of intolerance when he is throttled for sucking eggs. RAILROAD travelling is a delightful improvement of human life. Man is become a bird; he can fly The longer and quicker than a Solan goose. mamma rushes sixty miles in two hours to the aching fingers of her conjugating and declining grammar boy. The early Scotchman scratches himself in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly before the setting The Puseyite priest, after a rush of a hundred miles, appears with his little volume of nonsense at the breakfast of his bookseller. Everything is near, everything is immediate―time, distance and delay are abolished. sun. I USED to think a fall from a horse dangerous, but much experience has convinced me to the contrary. I have had six falls in two years, and just behaved like the Three per Cents., when they fall I got up again, and am not a bit the worse for it any more than the stock in question. 66 FOOTE NOTES. HE late Lord Kelly had a very red AN author, after reading a play to Foote, was told that it would not do by any means. "I wish, sir," said the writer, "you could advise me what is best to do with it." "That I can," said the manager: "blot out one half and burn the other." FOOTE expressed his conviction that a certain miser would take the beam out of his own eyes, if he could manage to sell the timber. FOOTE praising the hospitality of the Irish, after one of his trips to the sister kingdom, a gentleman asked him whether he had ever been at Cork. "No sir,” replied Foote; "but I have seen many drawings of it." QUIN could overthrow even Foote. At one time they had had a quarrel and were reconciled, but Foote was still a little piqued. "Jemmey," said he, "you should not have said that I had but one shirt, and that I lay in bed while it was washed." 'Sammy," replied the actor, "I could not have said so, for I never knew that you had a shirt to wash." THE FIELD OF WATERLOO. And when they smiled because he deemed i near, His heart more truly knew that peal too well TOP! for thy tread is on an empire's dust! An earthquake's spoil is sepulchred below! Is the spot marked with no colossal bust? Nor column trophied for triumphal show? None but the moral's truth tells simpler so. As the ground was before, thus let it be; How that red rain hath made the harvest grow! He rush'd into the field, and, foremost fighting, fell! And is this all the world hath gained by thee, Thou first and last of fields! king-making victory? There was a sound of revelry by night, Did ye not hear it? No; 'twas but the wind Within a window'd niche of that high hall Ah! then and there was hurrying to and fro, Which ne'er might be repeated! Who could If ever more should meet those mutual eyes, Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise? And there was mounting in hot haste; the steed, And wild and high the "Cameron's gathering" rose The war note of Lochiel, which Albyn's bills Have heard-and heard too have her Saxon foes- Their mountain pipe, so fill the mountaineers And Ardennes waves above them her green Dewy with nature's tear-drops, as they pass Ere evening to be trodden like the grass, grow Which now beneath them, but above shall Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which, when rent, A VOYAGE AND A HAVEN. SOLITARY ship, in mid-ocean, its white sails touched by the silver moonbeams which fall beyond them in a wide glittering track upon the waste of waters. Under the steelblue sky, on the restless bosom of the beautiful, awful sea, no other object in sight, seemingly in existence, but that silent, gliding ship; grand, even in its littleness, amid the great space; solemn and ghostlike as it moves through the booming waves under the steady heaven-flooding radiance on high. Save for the watch, her decks are solitary, and her human freight is below-sleeping for the most part, all quiet at least. Mary Pemberton is not sleeping; she lies in her narrow bed, her child upon her arm, listening to the rhythmical rush of the surging waves as they go by the ship; she can see them through the small window of her state-room, where the moonlight daintily tips them with myriad sparkles of silver light. How beautiful the night is, and how unusually still the ship! The straining, the creaking, the flapping, the innumerable sounds which are inseparable from motion on the great deep, and the management of that floating wonder, a ship, are reduced to a minimum tonight, and the sense of quiet is soothing. Mary is dreaming, though she does not sleep; dreaming of a country that is very far off, and of a waiting figure upon its shore, keeping patient watch for her. And, still dreaming, though she does not sleep, she sees the years of the past go trooping by, they pass before her eyes, float out into the air, and melt into the sparkles upon the waves; a long, long train of them-childhood, girlhood, womanhood, wifehood, motherhood-such is the order in which they pass, and pass away. The faces of the loved long ago, and the lost long ago-father and mother; a sister who died as a young child; a brother whom India slew among its thousands; child-friends; girl-friends; the lover who had been so false to her; the husband who had been so true to her; the home which had been so dear, until, in one moment, it ceased to be home at all, and home meant thenceforth for Mary the unseen land. How strangely it came back to her to-night, as she lay with the sleeping infant nestled in her bosom, an atom in the immensity around! It came back with every detail perfect, every foot of ground, every tree, every room, and piece of furniture. Mary felt as though her mind were roaming independent of her will through all the forsaken scenes of her lost happiness, and recognised with a placid surprise that the journey was not all pain. Such small things came out of the deep shadows of the past and showed themselves to her again, things which might be called trifles, only that there are no trifles in the storehouse of memory where death has set its seal; and, strange to say, they did not torture her, as small things can torture more keenly than the greater, because they tell of the frightful continuous intimacy and clinging presence of ruin and desolation. Mary, wondering, but very placidly, at herself, thought this must be one of the states of mind which she had read of as accompanying bodily weakness. She had been very ill during the early part of the voyage. Yes, it must be so; thus people remembered and mused when the body had less than its usual tongues of flame leaping hungrily amid their lurid power over them. "All my life could not come back to me more uncalled, or more calmly," she thought, "if I were going to him, and knew it, and were just summing it up beforehand." Then it seemed to Mary that, pressing the infant yet more closely to her breast, she fell asleep, to be roused by a sudden stir and commotion where all had been so quiet, and to come presently to a confused sense that there was danger somewhere, volume, hung about the rigging; the terrible hissing and crackling in which the Fire King delivers his grim sentence of death sounded in the ears of the doomed passengers. The ship was still moving rapidly through the water, and the moon was still shedding its serene effulgence on the scene. Were all those human creatures to die a terrible death in mid-ocean, on such a night as this, with Heaven's fairest torch-bearer lighting them to their doom? None asked, none knew and all around horrible fear. She found herself in a moment, she knew not how-her child in her arms, and a loose garment wrapped about them both in the saloon, in the midst of the other passengers, who had been roused, like herself, from peaceful security, with Ida clinging, dumb and terror-stricken, to her; a dreadful clamour of shrieks and weeping breaking the moon-lit stillness of the night, and everywhere the awful cry, "Fire! fire!" A few moments more, and they were on the deck, Mary and Ida, and in the terror and clamour and confusion Bessy West found the other two somehow, and so they formed a separate group amid the crowding, tumultuous agony of the scene. Great clouds of smoke, with red, darting whence came the death-dealing peril; the fire had been smouldering somewhere for hours, no doubt, and had come stealthily creeping into evidence when its awful and invincible supremacy had grown too sure for remedy, and was gaining new territory too swiftly for combat. There was no hope of saving the ship. Amid the frightful noise and rushing motion, the unrestrained violence or the cowering abjectness of fear, the knowledge of this fact spread rapidly, and Mary Pemberton understood it at once. "The boats !-the boats!" Several of the crew set to work to get the boats out, and with the usual results. A rush, in which the women were ruthlessly trampled under foot, or pushed overboard, was made for the first boat that was lowered, and it was swamped, with the loss of all who had crowded into it. A second boat was lowered with more success, the sailors keeping back the crowd by main force, and, in this instance, some sort of discipline was maintained; while all the time volumes of smoke rolled in blinding masses over the devoted vessel, red flames leaped wildly up from a dozen points at once, the terrific uproar was not lulled for an instant, and the sudden rising of the wind hastened the ravages of the fire, and rendered the danger more hideous. Mary Pemberton had not uttered a word since she and Ida and Bessie West had been swept up to the deck of the ship by the force of the clamouring throng pressing out of the saloon. Holding her baby with one arm, the other placed around Ida's half-senseless form, she stood and looked about her with dry, red, haggard eyes, to see whether there was any help or hope. The infant woke and cried, and she mechanically put it to her breast, and crooned a few notes to it; and it was pacified by the mother's voice. The officers of the ship were striving to keep order, and to get the women conveyed in safety to the second boat, which had been safely lowered. One of them came up to Mrs. Pemberton, and would have hurried her over the side of the burning ship. She held Ida firmly in her grasp, and pressed forward with her, the girl shuddering and moaning. "Shut your eyes, dearest; do not look while they lift you," was all she said to Ida. At that moment a man caught hold of Bessie West, and whirled her into the grasp of another who was seconding the efforts of the officers. In a moment she was lowered into the boat, from which a cry arose "No more-no more-or we shall be lost!" Then Mary Pemberton spoke to the officer who was fighting her way to safety for her, and pushed Ida into his arms. amid that clamour, made itself heard. It was uttered by a party of men who were trying to launch the third boat. The fire was too quick and too strong for them; they were cut off from the boat by a barrier of flame and smoke. During that moment, having caught the cry and its meaning, Mary Pemberton had wrenched herself away from Ida's hold, and, with another hurried entreaty to the officer: "Save them! they are my children," she placed the infant in Ida's passive arms, tied the shawl in which it was wrapped, sling-fashion, over the girl's shoulder with incredible quickness, and fell back from her just one step. It was enough; the next instant she was struck apart from Ida, and the officer was hurrying his terrified charge over the side. A dozen arms were stretched up to receive Ida, and when she sank swooning in the boat, as the rowers struck out from the side of the burning ship, down which the sparks were falling, and the blazing cordage was dragging in tangled masses, Bessy West supported her on her knees, and gently loosed the baby from its imprisonment. The strong rowers pulled the crowded boat swiftly away from the ship. All about her the water seemed to be ablaze with red light; and masses of her ruins, with human beings clinging to them, floated and tumbled about in the waves. When the boat was nearly a mile from the blazing hulk that had been the stately Albatross, and in the middle of the moon-track, the rowers lay-to upon their oars, and they and the people in the boat gazed at her in silence appalled. They had escaped from the fiery death which was devouring her, but to what fate? The ship burned with extraordinary fierceness and rapidity, and the people in the boat still looked on, appalled; until, with a terrific explosion, she was rent asunder, and the severed portions were scattered far and wide over the surface of the ocean. A minute later, and before the terrified survivors "Make them take one more," she said, "and in the boat had drawn breath again, there glided save her, for God's sake!" into sight across the moon-track, and at no very At that moment a cry, audible and piercing even great distance from them, a sail! |