south. Along the coast of Durham, Northumberland, and Yorkshire, and even inland, there are here and there to be met with, to this day, occasional little colonies of people, with their peculiar dialect and cast of form and feature, different from the surrounding districts, and indicating a much larger admixture than ordinary of Danish race,-deposits, as they would seem to be, of that tide of colonization or invasion which went on for centuries between Norway and Denmark, and the northern shores of Britain. But we leave this part of the subject, however interesting it be in an ethnological point of view, and return to "cannie Newcastle."

Still the district continued turbulent, unsettled, and abounding in discord and warfare. For centuries it continued a debateable ground, now belonging to the Scots, at another time to the Saxons or English. At length the Norman conquest took place, and left its marks at Newcastle, as elsewhere. The Normans were great builders of castles. So soon as they had conquered a district, they erected a strong fort in some commanding and secure place, as a foot-hold, to enable them to make good their conquest, and to protect themselves against the vengeance of the conquered. We find them erecting their strong keeps at York and Richmond, which still stand; and advancing northward, they made good their footing beyond the Tyne, and erected a castle on the site of the old Roman fortification at Pons Elii.

Hence the name of New Castle. Still the district continued ravaged by war. The Scots for many centuries continued most troublesome and cruel neighbours, their reivers and freebooters often advancing up to the walls of Newcastle, and sometimes beyond it, into the heart of the country. David of Scotland got possession of the castle once, and the room of the old keep is still pointed out, in which he must have slept. Numerous royal conferences took place here, between the distinguished personages of the two countries; and armies passed and repassed its walls, in the course of the long wars which embroiled England and Scotland. The castle was the stronghold of the entire district to the north; and when invasion threatened, the defenceless inhabitants made at once for its walls. The last occasion on which it was used as a place of defence, was during the wars of the Commonwealth, in 1644, when it stood a siege, and after a gallant resistance, was taken by the Scots under General Leslie.

One of the most interesting sights in Newcastle, is the old Norman keep, as it still stands there. Approaching the town from the south, by railway, over the magnificent High Level Bridge,-the grandest feature of modern Newcastle,-you see far beneath you the Tyne flowing from east to west, under the arches of the old bridge, across which a throng of people, looking like so many busy ants, are constantly moving to and fro. At the north end of the High Level Bridge, on a lofty platform, stands the venerable Norman keep; the emblems of the new and the old times standing face to face,-here a triumphant achievement of peace and industry, there a record of war,-here a highway from north to south, there a bulwark of protection against invaders. Though so near together, a gap of eight hundred years divides them,-years full of progress, turbulent though they oft-times were.

The Castle is no longer a defence: it is a mere antiquarian relic now, but one full of interest, and containing, within it and about it, abundant materials for reflection. It is tenanted by the Antiquarian Society of Newcastle, which has bestowed great care on its preservation, and is daily adding to it objects of antiquarian interest. The Castle is surrounded by a group of streets full of all the odour of antiquity.

They are packed thick and close all round it, except where a platform has been recently cleared in the immediate vicinity of the Keep, and which has completely exposed it on its three principal sides. But a thick cluster of ancient houses still stands about the Black Gate; King Street and Queen Street, lying on either side of it, both antique in the extreme. Flights of streets,-narrow. dark. and miserable, hang clustering along the face of the hill, down to the banks of the Tyne; street ranged above street, in parallel lines, thus making available every inch of ground in the immediate neighbourhood of the old Castle.

It is

We need scarcely describe the keep itself. built on the usual plan of such Norman structures, and has been devised with an eye to the most perfect security possible. It must have been a place of great strength, though of very great discomfort. Narrow slits in the wall let in a few rays of light; the floors and walls of stone; gusts of wind blowing through the place; dark and cold as a dungeon. Yet such places, which any labouring man would now refuse to live in, the Norman nobles built for themselves, and voluntarily inhabited, fenced round by thick stone walls and strong men-at-arms. A curious feature of these old Norman castles is, that they contain no dungeons for prisoners. Normans made no prisoners. They slew their enemies on the spot, and gave them six feet of earth. Where dungeons have been added, they are of a subsequent date to the original erection, and, strange to say, they exhibit the progress of civilization after a sort.

The

The great hall of the Newcastle Keep occupies a large portion of the building. It is arched over-head, and is above forty feet high. Probably, however, one or more floors originally occupied the upper portion of this space, forming the sleeping-rooms of the keep. The hall is now decorated all round by articles of curious interest, the property of the Antiquarian Society,-old spears, helmets, coats of mail, hauberks, arquebusses, axes, spurs, pikes, and swords. There is a large open fireplace in the hall,— an altogether unusual invention in a Norman keep, the Norman soldiers having usually dispensed with that luxury. The fireplace is therefore modern, and bears the date of 1599, in the reign of Elizabeth, when "comfort" had begun to be valued by English folks. Take it as a whole, the apartment is a grand one, and the sight of it carries the mind back to the royal banquets so often held there,-Baliol doing homage to Edward for Scotland in this very apartment; John of England and Alexander of Scotland conspiring together here; David of Scotland occupying it as master; Edward II. and his favourite, Gaveston, roystering here hundreds of years ago. Out of the Hall, a narrow door leads to a small stone chamber, where the monarch slept when here, and it is hence known as the king's chamber; a cold cheerless place it must have been, lighted by loop-holes, originally much narrower than they are now, and closed in, not with glass, but wooden shutters. a curious place for kings to have lodged in.

It is

The view from the upper platform of the castle is grand and extensive. There, immediately beneath you on the north, lies the blackened old town, and beyond it, stretching away on all sides, is the busy, thriving, smoke covered, new city, containing within its compass more extensive and elegant streets than are to be found in any other town in England, out of London. Turn round, and there, in the valley, the Tyne winds along from east to west, covered with shipping. Rows of vessels of heavy burden are moored along Quay-side, which is in a tumult of business. On the other side of the river, clambering

up the face of the hill, in steep and zig-zag streets, is Black Gateshead, clamorous with life, like its elder sister on the north. What a different gaze was that which met the warder's eye when pacing his lonely rounds of yore! Beyond the walls, moors and green fields, occasionally a distant pennon, then the glinting spears of moss-troopers, or the rush of defenceless women and children towards the castle walls for shelter.

Under the great hall are several other interesting apartments, the chapel, the commandant's apartments (now the comfortable Library of the Antiquarian Society), the dungeon, so called because it was thus occupied when the place was used as the county gaol; but most probably in olden times it was the room occupied by the soldiers of the garrison. The stone pillar in the centre of the apartment is hollow, and pipes were carried down and let out at various openings, through which the occupants were supplied with water from above. These, and the adjoining apartments, contain many remarkable curiositiesancient British stone coffins, and numerous Roman tablets and monuments, dug out of the old Roman wall.

How different from the narrow, gloomy, and grim contrivances of this Norman keep, is the noble architecture of Grey Street, the Arcade, the Central Exchange, and the many fine streets in their immediate neighbourhood, forming the New Town of Newcastle! These magnificent erections are only of modern date; they have all been created within the last thirty years, and they are the productions of the genius (for we can call it nothing less) of one man,Grainger, of Newcastle, originally a poor charity-boy, the son of a porter on the quay. His genius and enterprise have put an entirely new face on the old town; and from being one of the most crowded and disagreeable, it has within the life-time of this man, been made one of the handsomest towns in the empire. For many years Grainger has been in a state of embarrassment, from the extensive enterprises in which he has been engaged, heightened by the local monetary crises from which Newcastle has suffered more than any other district in England; but we are glad to learn that his difficulties are now nearly got rid of, and before many years are past, the property he has been instrumental in creating will bring him in a very large annual revenue.

The valley of the Tyne, both above and below Newcastle, contains many objects of interest, which are easily accessible by railway at all hours. The river comes down from the fells and moors of the west, from Tindale, whose reivers used to be the terror of Durham and Northumberland themselves, as much as they were of the Scottish borders. The Tyne runs eastward through a fine valley, with high banks rising up on either side, crowned at many places with old beacons, and peel towers, and baronial castles, formerly the seats of the Baliols, the Riddells, the Umfravilles, the Herons, and other old warrior races. The castles along the valley are nearly all confined to the south bank of the river, which seems to have been regarded as a protecting fosse along its whole length; and thus you have Featherstone, Bellister, Willimoteswick, Langley, Dilston, and Prudhoe Castles, all formerly places of great strength.

Its

Of these, Prudhoe Castle stands the nearest to Newcastle, on a lofty height overlooking the village of Ovingham, on the opposite bank of the river. situation is fine and commanding, standing out as it does on a green promontory, from whence you have a charming prospect, both up and down the valley of the Tyne. It now belongs to the Percy family, and the agent of the property occupies a snug modern house, built within the castle yard, out of the old

ruins. Here too peace has settled down, and the stream which formerly filled the Percy's moat, now turns a mill; near where the drawbridge formerly stood, a miller plies his brisk trade, and fears neither Tindale nor Liddiesdale reivers.

Cross the Ovingham ferry,-enter the quiet churchyard, and you find a tablet erected over the remains of Thomas Bewick, the famous wood-engraver, whose descendants still occupy the house at Cherryburn, near at hand, in which he was born. Jackson the wood-engraver, one of his most celebrated pupils, was born in the same parish; and a little further up the Tyne, at Haydon Bridge, you come upon the birthplace of John Martin, the great painter. At Wylam, the first railway in the district was laid down, and George Stephenson, the Railway Viking, was born in a humble cottage near at hand.

There are quite as many objects of interest to be observed along the Tyne below Newcastle, as above it; but we have already exhausted our space, and may return again to that interesting locality for a subject.

LONDON STREET-FOLK-COSTER LIFE.

THE present age is remarkable for its spirit of inquiry into the social conditions of men of all ranks. "How do poor men live?" is a question in answer to which many parliamentary blue-books have already been devoted. We have now ascertained with painful accuracy the sanitary state of the working population. We know how they live; what their dwellings are; what their income is and how they spend it; what they save, or rather what they do not save; how they are taxed; how many of them cannot read and write; how much sooner they die than the average of the comfortable classes; what they eat, what they drink, and what they wear; how many of them live in one room and sleep in one bed; almost every circumstance in their social and domestic state now lies bare and open to us. They have no domestic secrets nor private affairs. The life of the poor is now matter of notoriety; and the parliamentary commissioners have ferreted them out, and printed statistical accounts of them. Charity, curiosity, and philanthropy,—the home-missionary, the newspaper-reporter, Edwin Chadwick, and Lord Ashley,-have taken inventory of all their defects, physical, moral, and spiritual. The physician has inspected their sores, and the magistrate their vices. The divine knows how many of them do not attend church, and the teetotaller how many go to the gin-shop. Society, like a policeman, has flashed its bull's-eye full upon them, and the darkest recesses of their social state have been revealed to us.

Mr. Mayhew, in his work on "London Labour and the London Poor," has brought into prominent view the details of the daily life of the prowlers of the London streets. He has pushed his inquiry to an extreme, and given us a series of portraits in daguerreotype, of the poorest classes of labourers in this vast city. This book we have found most interesting. It is written in a kindly and humane spirit, and with a benevolent purpose. Were the inquiries into the state of the poor to which we have alluded merely conducted with the view to gratify an idle curiosity, we should deprecate them, as calculated to irritate the poor and to widen the breach already too wide between them and the classes above them. features of these pictures are so repulsive in many respects, that they might be calculated to repel rather than to attract, were it not that there is a deep vein of humanity running through them all, and that they are so exhibited as to invite the sym

The

pathy and aid of those willing and able to assist the poorer classes in their efforts to elevate themselves. In order to remedy a condition we must first know what it is and this is the kind of information that has now been abundantly supplied to us by the elaborate and numerous inquiries which have been made during the last few years into the actual condition of the people, and published in reports and statistics, in lectures and essays, and even in tales and

romances.

It will be confessed that the classes depicted by Mr. Mayhew are the most difficult to deal with of all. They are a kind of vagabond or nomadic class, — metropolitan gipsies, London "Fingoes,"-city squatters,--living upon the crumbs which they can pick up from the tables of the settled population at large. They include all kinds of beggars, bone-grubbers, mud-larks, patterers, costermongers, fruit and fish-sellers, dog-sellers, hawkers of all kinds, street artists and showmen, acrobats,-in short, the entire loose and wandering population of this great city. There is one class, and that a considerable one, that lives by "finding,"-picking up a living in the public thoroughfares, by gathering up bits of coal, ends of half-smoked cigars, bones, rags, and such like, which they manage to dispose of for money. But the most important and respectable class of wanderers described by Mr. Mayhew, is the costermonger class; these include fish-sellers, retailers of vegetables, oranges, ginger beer, fruit, and such like articles,— they are the hucksters and greengrocers of the streets, supplying a large portion of the working population of London with food and little comforts, which they deal out from stands, hand-barrows, and donkey carts. Their number is very great,-being not less, according to Mr. Mayhew, than 30,000, men, women, and children; and a large majority of them are unable to read and write. The Irish costers form a considerable proportion of the number; this population invariably assuming a place among the very lowest strata of society in all our large towns. Add to these the patterers, or sellers of street literature, who consider themselves the "aristocracy of the streetsellers," the street musicians, the sellers of watercresses, the keepers of coffee stails, the cats'-meat retailers, ballad-singers, play-bill sellers, bone-grubbers and mud-larks; crossing-sweepers, street-performers, and showmen; tinkers, chair, umbrella, and clock-menders; sellers of bonnet-boxes, toys, statuary, songs, last-dying-speeches, tubs, pails, mats, crockery, blacking, lucifers, corn-salves, clothes-pegs, brooms, sweetmeats, razors, dog-collars, dogs, birds, coals, and sand; scavengers, dustmen, and others,--and it appears that not fewer than fifty thousand individuals, or a fortieth part of the population, find their living in such ways in the streets of London.

Costermongering is a trade which many take up with when all other trades fail. Among the patterers are those who have been clergymen. And the orange and herring-sellers include many who have at one time in their life been mechanics or labourers. For the most part, however, they are a distinct peoplealmost as much so as the gipsies are. Costers' children grow up costers, they acquire the slang, the wandering habits, and the vocation, of their parents; and rarely in after-life settle down to any fixed vocation. Many of them make small gains. "Bless you," said one, "we don't find a living at all, it's only another way of starving." Some of them, however, in the higher grades of fish and vegetable selling, make fair earnings, but they seem to spend them as readily as they make them. The costers are great card-players,-all-fours, cribbage, all-fives, and put, being their favourite games. The play is usually for beer, and is made exciting by bets which are

The

freely laid. Those who cannot read are yet quick at the calculations of cribbage. A large number of the costers are "sporting characters;" fond of dogfighting, rat-killing, horse-racing, and pugilism. The children take after the parents in their love of amusement, frequenting penny gaffs, twopenny hops, and penny theatres. At the " hops," from 30 to 100 young people of both sexes assemble, from the age of 14 and upwards, and there engage in vigorous dancing, varied with a good deal of drinking. youths are also taught early to fight, and to "work their fists." If a quarrel takes place between two coster boys, the old ones form a ring and urge them to "fight it out." But the bravest feat of a young coster is to serve out a policeman. With all Peelers the costers are at war, never hesitating to employ treachery and cunning to assail and maul them. "Some lads," says Mr. Mayhew, "have been in prison upwards of a dozen times for this offence; and are consequently looked upon by their companions as martyrs. When they leave prison for such an act, a subscription is often got up for their benefit. In their continual warfare with the force, they resemble many savage nations, from the cunning and treachery they use. The lads endeavour to take the unsuspecting 'crusher' by surprise, and often crouch at the entrance of a court until a policeman passes, when a stone or brick is hurled at him, and the youngster immediately disappears." Nearly all the young costers are desperate gamblers, the attempts made to check the practice by the police giving a gloss of daring courage to the sport, which seems to make it doubly attractive. Pie. boys will toss each other for their stock; ill-luck only makes them more reckless, and they will proceed to gambling away their coat, neck-tie, and even their cord trowsers, before they will give up.

The

The "Vic," or Coburg Theatre, is the favourite resort of play-going coster lads. The bulk of the "gods" there are costers,--chiefly boys and girls: few grown men are found in the gallery, which holds from 1,500 to 2,000. At the back it is not unusual to see boys piled on each other's shoulders all round. The area is like a huge black heap dotted with faces, and spotted with white shirt-sleeves, the young costers mostly taking off their coats. bonnets of the "ladies" are hung over the iron railings in front, and clever marksmen try their skill at pitching into them nut-shells and bits of orange peel. "An occasional burst of the full band," says Mr. Mayhew, "is heard by gushes, as if a high wind were raging. Recognitions take place every moment, and 'Bill Smith' is called to in a loud voice from one side, and a shout in answer from the other, asks 'What's up?' Or family secrets are revealed, and Bob Triller' is asked where Sal' is, and replies, amid a roar of laughter, that she is a-learning the pynanney.' The conversation ceases suddenly on the rising of the curtain, and then the cries of Silence! Ord-a-a-r! Ord-a-a-r!' make more noise than ever. Whilst the pieces are going on, brown flat bottles are frequently raised to the mouth, and between the acts a man with a tin can, glittering in the gas-light, goes round, crying Port-a-a-a-r! who's for port-a-a a-r?' No delay between the pieces will be allowed, and should the interval appear too long, some one, referring to the curtain, will shout out Pull up that 'ere window blind!' or they will call to the orchestra, Now then, you cat-gut scrapers! Let's have a ha'porth of liveliness!' But the grand hit of the evening is always when a song is sung to which the entire gallery can join in chorus. Some actors at the minor theatres make a great point of this, and in the bill upon the night of my visit, under the title of "There's a good time coming, boys,' there was printed, 'assisted by the most numerous and effective chorus

64

The

in the metropolis,'-meaning the whole of the gal lery. The singer himself started the mob, saying, Now then, gentlemen, the Exeter Hall touch!" and beat time with his hand, parodying M. Jullien with his búton. An angcore on such occasions is always insisted on, and, despite a few murmurs of Change it to Duck-legged Dick,' invariably insisted on." The domestic morale of costers is low. "Only one-tenth-at the outside one-tenth-of the couples living together, and carrying on the costermongering trade, are married. Costers consider it a mere waste of time and money," says Mr. Mayhew, to go through the ceremony of wedlock, when a pair can live together, and be quite as well regarded by their fellows, without it." Among costers, no honour attaches to the married state, and no shame to concubinage. Unmarried women in this state have as good a standing in their society as married women have. Pairs live together while the liking continues, and then do not hesitate to form other similar connections. Matches are usually made up in the dancing-rooms, and are sometimes struck up on the first night of meeting: the coster boy is fourteen, and the coster girl perhaps no older. They then begin costering on their own account. Nearly all such alliances are formed under twenty. religion of costers is no better. Not three in every hundred have ever been in the interior of a church, and the great majority of them know of sacred names only as words to swear by. They have no notion of a future state. They hate tracts, which "gives them the 'orrors." Indeed they cannot read them, and even if they could, they would not, for the tractdistributors never give them anything except tracts, and are looked upon as interlopers. The Irish costers are generally Catholics, and are visited by their priests; but no priest of any kind looks after the costers who are not Irish. Ignorant as the costers are of religion, they are not much more so than the bulk of the poor population of all our large towns-especially in the manufacturing districts. Good, religious, well-educated persons in the country, have positively no idea of the practical heathenism in which the people there are allowed to grow up. Sometimes a startling fact is brought suddenly to light, such as the following:- An inquiry was instituted in the Sheffield Workhouse the other day, from which it was ascertained, that out of 1,905 inmates, 1,407 were of no religious persuasion, and thirteen avowed themselves to be of none. In this country, we bestow our sympathy and Christian action mainly upon the blacks of Caffraria and the remote olive population of the islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Mr. Mayhew observes, "That a class numbering 30,000 should be permitted to remain in a state of almost brutish ignorance, is a national disgrace. If the London costers belong especially to the dangerļ ous classes,' the danger of such a body is assuredly of our own creation; for the gratitude of the poor creatures to any one who seeks to give them the least knowledge, is almost pathetic."

Very few of the costermongers' children are sent even to the Ragged Schools. The only education they receive is what the streets afford; and there they acquire a kind of precocious acuteness in all that concerns their immediate wants, business, or gratifications; a strong desire to obtain money without working for it; a craving for the excitement of gambling an inordinate love of amusement; and an irrepressible repugnance to any settled in-door industry. Instinct with the elements of manhood and beasthood, the latter are those which are almost solely developed, while the qualities of the man rarely struggle into being. The moral atmosphere in which

the coster grows, is frightfully destructive of the principles of goodness, virtue, and intelligence.

And yet there is a rude honesty among costers. They never steal from each other. Their property, such as it is, is always exposed; and they do not hesitate to leave their stall in charge of a neighbour who is a competitor in the same line of business, without the slightest fear or suspicion. Their barrows lie about exposed all night, unwatched, but safe. Even their stables, where they keep their donkeys and oysters, are usually unguarded by either lock or latch; but the coster sleeps securely and sound. He is kind to his donkey, and resents the ill-treatment of an animal of this class almost as a personal affront. The coster shares his dinner with his donkey, giving it a portion of his bread. He even believes in the donkey's intelligence. "It's all nonsense to call donkeys stoopid," said one, "them's stoopid that calls them so they're sensible. Not long since, I worked Guildford with my donkey-cart and a boy. Jack (the donkey), was slow and heavy in coming back, until we came in sight of the lights at Vauxhall Gate, and then he trotted on like one o'clock, he did, indeed! just as if he smelt it was London, besides seeing it, and knew he was at home.'

"There was a friend of mine," said another man, "had great trouble about his donkey a few months back. He was doing a little work on a Sunday morning at Wandsworth, and the poor thing fell down dead. He was very fond of his donkey, and kind to it, and the donkey was very fond of him. He thought he wouldn't leave the poor creature he'd had a good while, and had been out with in all weathers, by the road-side, so he dropped all notion of doing business, and with help, got the poor dead thing into his cart; its head lolloping over the end of the cart, and its poor eyes staring at nothing. He thought he'd drag it home and bury it somewheres. It wasn't for the value he dragged it, for what's a dead donkey worth? There was a few persons about him, and they was all quiet, and seemed sorry for the poor fellow and for his donkey; but the church bells struck up, and up came a crusher,' and took the man up, and next day he was fined 10s.,-I can't exactly say for what. He never saw no more of the animal, and lost his stock as well as his donkey."

One of the remarkable features of the costermonger's trade, is the usurious rate of interest which they are habitually in the practice of paying for the use of their carts and hand-barrows. Three-fourths of the entire number hire these articles from persons who let them out; and on every £100 of value in hand-barrows thus advanced by the owners, they derive an annual interest of not less than twenty per cent. per week, or £1,040 in the year! This is, perhaps, the most usurious rate of interest known. The costers will not save money, by which they could purchase barrows of their own (though the cost of each barrow is not more than £2 when new), but they pay to the lender from 1s. to 1s. 6d. a week for its use. These lenders, of course, make immense profits, one man deriving not less than £360 a year from the hire of 120 barrows! Many of the men who adopt this trade on a large scale become rich in the course of a few years, and are living without labour, while the poor costers are trundling about their barrows, and paying them the frightful interest | of above a thousand per cent! Costers are also most improvident in borrowing. They will not hesitate to give 5s. for the use of 2s. 6d. for a day-the day being usually Saturday, the advance being repaid at night. But losses must often be sustained by the lenders in such cases. Mr. Mayhew, however, observes, that "Those who are unacquainted with

332

the character of the people may feel inclined to doubt the trustworthiness of the class; but it is an extraordinary fact, that but few of the costermongers fail to repay the money advanced to them, even at The poor, it is the present ruinous rate of interest. my belief, have not yet been sufficiently tried in this respect; pawnbrokers, loan-offices, tally-shops, dollyshops, are the only parties who will trust them; but as a startling proof of the good faith of the humbler classes generally, it may be stated that Mrs. Chisholm (the lady who has exerted herself so benevolently in the cause of Emigration), has lent out, at different times, as much as £160,000 that has been intrusted to her for the use of the "lower orders," and that the whole of this large amount has been returned with the exception of £12!"

The entire picture which is given by Mr. Mayhew of the Costermongers, in minute detail, respecting their life, habits, business, bunts, tally-women, boys, girls, donkeys, and wheel-barrows, is most interesting; it is full of incident, gives the reader a curious insight into the lowest grades of city life, and is at once painful and cheering;-painful, inasmuch as it exhibits a vast number of human beings living in a degraded state, abandoned to the mere life of the senses; and cheering, inasmuch as, through the dense overgrowth of ignorance and vice, there stand out here and there the unmistakeable marks of human goodness, kindness, honesty, and faithfulness, which only need a better culture to exhibit their noblest fruits.

THERE was once a cook-maid, named Grethel, who, when she went out on festival days, wore red-heeled shoes, and held herself proudly, thinking all the time how handsome and gay she looked. On her return home, she always took a good draught of beer, and then, as it gave her an appetite, she treated herself to the best in the larder, saying, as she ate, "A cook must know how things taste, if she wants to make them good!"

"Grethel!" said her master to her one day, "I expect a guest to sup with me this evening, so roast a couple of fowls for us!"

"I'll see about it at once, Sir," answered Grethel. Off she ran, caught two plump young chickens, killed them, scalded them, plucked them, stuck them on the spit, and, as supper-time was approaching, put them down to roast. They soon began to brown and froth, but the guest did not come. visitor be not here presently," bawled Grethel from the kitchen, "I'll have to take the chickens from the fire; but it will be a sin and a shame not to eat them the moment they are done."

66 If your

"I'll run out, and fetch him," answered her master. As soon as his back was turned, Grethel moved the spit from the fire, saying, "It's hot work, this turning; and who knows when the guest will come? in the mean time, I'll go down to the cellar for a drink."

Down she went, drew a pitcherful of beer, and, with a "Bless you, Grethel !" took a hearty draught. "One drink brings on another," said she, so she finished the contents of the jug, and then went up stairs to put the chickens to the fire again.

"I hope I have forgotten nothing in the cooking," thought she, as she merrily turned the spit; "how nice they smell! it's a sin and a shame that there's no one here to eat them."

She looked out of the window to see if her master

66

66

AGE AND YOUTH-MODERN IMPROVE
MENTS.

FORTY years ago, fair readers, I was a pretty girl of eighteen, I may be allowed to say so now, when a fat matron of fifty-eight, engaged in a correspondence with my eldest son, relative to the marriage of one of my numerous grand-daughters. Well! forty years ago, I made, with my parents and family, one of a large party of friends, who spent three months at Hastings; and a delightful party it was, almost as We took two days delightful as Hastings itself then.

to travel from London, sleeping at Stone Crouch, enjoying the rich varied scenery we passed, in all the green glory of June, in a manner railroad excursionists, who take four hours to come the same distance, can form but a faint conception of. The town was very small, being mostly situated between the east and west hills; George Street was a mere