"Which showed conclusively that your cook is not gifted with the second sight," said Austin. "But, you know, you have put yourself and Dr. Mortemn's reputation in a measure into my power. If you refuse me anything I ask you, which I know you can grant if you like, I shall have a remedy to which I can resort henceforth. I shall simply find my way to the kitchen and warn cook against taking opiates for toothache -assigning reasons for the same. I suspect that would effectually upset your plans in regard to recipes for jelly! So beware how you provoke me when I am mischievously inclined. I suppose you have a good many sick people among the poor in the village? Do you make a practise of ministering to their necessities?"

"No, Mr. Reefer, I'm much too selfish for that. I go and see some of them sometimes, and take them soup and pudding; but it's for something to do more than anything else, and because I can't bear to see them starving and dying under our very noses without giving them some of the comforts we have ourselves. But if they ask me to read to them, I always think it a chouse to have to sit a long time in their stuffy rooms, and get done out of a walk to Beauchamp Woods. I don't call that really doing good to the poor, or-what was it you said, Mr. Reefer?"

Ministering to their necessities, Miss Kate," said Austin, solemnly. "I am sure, my dear Kate, that you do yourself very great injustice, and impute motives to your conduct which I cannot think exist," interposed Mrs. Treeby. "She calls herself selfish, Mr. Reefer, but I am certain if you saw the thoughtful acts of kindness she is constantly doing to the poor people, and-"

"And the scrapes she used to get into when she used to climb trees for birds' nests with Ned in Beauchamp Woods, and come home with her frocks in tatters!" exclaimed Kate, putting her hands on her mother's mouth; "which Mr. Reefer will believe in much sooner. If you go telling him all my virtues at once, there won't be one left for him to find out."

"I shall ask leave to reserve my opinion of Miss Kate's charitable proclivities to a future occasion, Mrs. Treeby, if you have no objection," said Austin, with a smile.

"Oh, certainly, Mr. Reefer; and I hope you will believe that I never intended to ask you for it, only I am sure if you were to give an opinion at all, it would be a favourable one."

"It comforts one to hear that she has a natural dislike to the chapterreading department," said Austin. "I doubt if sitting up half the night, with every rheumatic old woman, would deepen the bloom of those carnations on her cheeks. Nothing is more delightful to see, and nothing does the world more good than philanthropy; but it has its limits. What do you say, Mrs. Treeby?"

I quite agree with you, Mr. Reefer, that to sit up at night nursing sick people at her age would be most unwise-nay, I think very wrong; in fact, I should make a point of never listening to anything of the sort. She is only eighteen; and at that age I consider a girl needs her full night's rest. Then, besides the want of sleep, in cases of fever and other infectious diseases, she would run the risk of being laid up herself, and I do not see that, young as she is, and with the prospect of a long life VOL. LXIII.

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before her, she is called upon to sacrifice herself in that way, unless it was absolutely necessary, as in the case of the illness of a near relation. No one, I am sure, can set a higher value on the privilege of ministering to the poor than I do, and no one can prize more dearly the gracious encouragement our Saviour gives us to do so; but, at the same time, I think that, when circumstances occur which are attended with danger and difficulty, or that even merely call for unusual exertion, the care of them should be entrusted to elderly people like myself, and not to the young, and buoyant, and happy, who will have to fill our places all in good time."

"Mrs. Treeby, permit me to say what pleasure it gives me to hear you take such a liberal and enlightened view of the subject," said Austin, warmly. "You are quite right. The young and beautiful have other duties to perform more important than those of playing district-visitor and Scripture-reader. They owe something to society and to their friends, and were never meant by nature to waste their sweetness in feverstricken hovels and in coddling bedridden paupers. Philanthropy is very beautiful, Miss Kate; but let me advise you to eschew it for the present."

"Philanthropy, Mr. Reefer !" cried Kate. "You don't call taking a jelly or a piece of cold rice-pudding to a poor person, and asking him if his rheumatics are better than they were yesterday, when you know well enough they are not, philanthropy! The man can't afford to get things of the kind, and you can, so it's not a bit of sacrifice for you to give them to him. What are people who have money meant for but to help those who haven't? Do you call it philanthropy to send some scraps from what is left at dinner to a dying man, Mr. Reefer, when, if we were dying ourselves, we wouldn't spare any amount of money to get all the luxuries we felt inclined for? There are some people I know-Miss Bipont, of Beauchamp Park, is one-who go into cottages where people are starving, and sit for hours reading long chapters in the Bible to them, and talk a great deal about it, and then go away without offering them a crust, telling them they hope they will attend church regularly, and smiling at them like angels, as if the people could go to church dressed in rags, and could listen to anything if they did, while they were ready to cry with hunger. It's a horrible shame! It's like going on purpose to mock them and insult their poverty; and if anybody makes a row about it, and tells Miss Bipont what a nasty mean thing it is to do, she says, 'They can always go to the workhouse, where they will get plenty to eat and drink, and the chance of a petticoat in winter.' To the workhouse!place they consider not a bit better than a gaol, and I don't believe it is. I wish somebody would put Miss Bipont in the workhouse for a year, or lock her up in the pound till somebody claimed her. I hate such people!"

a

If you could have brought the paupers of Marshward in a body into the drawing-room of Treeby Cottage, and shown them Kate Treeby standing at that moment beside her mother's chair, and confronting Mr. Austin Reefer, her figure drawn up, her dark eyes flashing, her cheeks flushed with excitement, and the receipt-book from time to time thundering down its emphasis upon the table, I think they would have found no

cause to be ashamed of their champion. I believe that some idea of this sort was passing through the mind of Mr. Austin Reefer himself, judging from the way he looked at Kate as she launched her diatribe at Miss

Bipont. "You have some elements of hostility in your nature, I see," he said, smiling. "You would suit Dr. Johnson, Miss Kate: he loved a good hater. I am curious to see the object of your enmity. You must point out Miss Bipont to me if we happen to meet her while you are showing me the lions of Marshward. If her philanthropy is of the kind you describe, I am at one with you in your opinion of her, though, perhaps, not to the extent of putting her in the pound. Evidently, in our opinion of the word philanthropy, we are not at one; and therefore, as the word admits of a wide interpretation, we had better, perhaps, agree to differ. My own definition would certainly include the cold rice-pudding, especially if administered by your own hand."

"But, Mr. Reefer," said Mrs. Treeby, "I hope you understood fully what I meant in what I said about young people visiting the poor. I never meant that it was entirely out of their province. No. Very, very far from it. I decidedly think it is their province, if they have health and opportunity, to befriend the needy and wretched, and that they should consider it their happiness to do so. I should always bring up any child of mine, not only to regard it as a duty, but as a pleasure to study and minister to the wants of those beneath it in station, in place of living merely for the selfish gratification of its own tastes. The young may all do something; and they will find that 'to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep themselves unspotted from the world,' brings its reward in this world as well as in the next. Ah, Mr. Reefer, I can tell! I know what it is to fritter away the best moments of life in the vain and selfish pursuit of pleasure, with a heart cold and dead to the beautiful vitalising truths of active Christianity. Our Lord wants each of us to walk in His blessed steps; and the youngest and weakest may help to feed His lambs, and should esteem it an honour and a privilege to be able to do so. What I said was only in reference to extreme cases, where, generally speaking, it seems that the circumstances should be met and dealt with by the old, and not by the young."

Austin was silent for a moment, deriving a keen pleasure apparently from watching that earnest, humble face shaded by the smooth grey tresses, with its furrows of suffering and grief, but with its lines also of calm, cheerful resignation, and deep, tender sympathies full of peace and good-will to men-a supremely beautiful face, and just the kind of face most pleasant to see in contrast to the fresh, joyous young countenance, smiling like perpetual youth near by. If he was not thinking within himself that the words which dropped from those lips were enough to make any man philanthropist, and a saint too, I very much wonder at it.

"What do you say to all that, Mr. Reefer ?" said Kate. "If you discourage the cold rice-pudding, you will get into hot water with mamma. I expect there will be a fearful row between you some day."

"I was informed on good authority that you were one of the nightingales of Marshward," replied Austin, abruptly changing the sub

ject. "I see Miss Treeby is not going to favour us with another song at present. Would the nightingale in question do me the kindness of warbling something pretty if I asked her ?"

"Nightingale !" said Kate, laughing; "what a grand name to invent! Who on earth called me that, Mr. Reefer? It couldn't have been papa. I never knew him call me anything but a rhomboid, which he means for tomboy, only he is thinking of Euclid all the time. I believe you got it out of your own head, Mr. Reefer. Who told you I could sing? You had better ask mamma. She is a better judge than I am, for she used to be a great swell-I mean, she used to sing awfully well herself when she was my age. If she goes in for my being a nightingale, you may ask me."

"Agreed," said Austin. "Mrs. Treeby, I appeal to you."

"Well, Mr. Reefer," replied the good lady, "I will not say that Kate is exactly a nightingale; the epithet would hardly be appropriate, and I dare say most people would consider it a piece of presumption and vanity to apply it, since the nightingale is supposed to be one of the finest, if not the finest, of British songsters. Emily can sing more difficult and elaborate pieces, and can go much higher up the scale; in fact, I often tell her she strains her voice by attempting too much; but you won't think I want to puff Kate, Mr. Reefer, when I say that her voice is more beautiful to me than any nightingale's, although her singing is of the simplest kind, and entirely the result of my own teaching, so that you will not have to be a very fastidious critic. I am sure, however, you would be pleased with her singing of some of Moore's melodies, particularly of that old favourite of my schoolroom days, 'The harp that once through Tara's hall.' ”

"No question about it, Mrs. ultingly, "I claim your promise. see. I always thought there was for The harp!'"

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Treeby. Miss Kate," he added, exYou are more than a nightingale, you some use in a court of appeal. Now

"And for once, Mr. Reefer, you have said something not in your roundabout way," cried Kate. Mamma, I shall begin to hate you-I shall, upon my word. Can't you let me sound my own praises? You've put me into a horrible fright by what you have said, and if I break down it will be your fault."

Then followed a grand osculatory tableau, prior to one of the actors taking her seat at the piano.

239

PRESTWOOD PAPERS.

BY FRANCIS JACOX.

V.-MR. PLEYDELL AT HIGH JINKS: TYPICALLY CONSIDERED.

COLONEL MANNERING finds in Counsellor Pleydell a lively, sharplooking gentleman, with a professional shrewdness in his eye, and, generally speaking, a professional formality in his manners. But this, like his three-tailed wig and black coat, he can slip off on a Saturday evening, when surrounded by a party of jolly companions, and disposed for what he calls his altitudes. On the occasion of Colonel Mannering's first introduction to him, Mr. Pleydell has been assisting at a revel already of some hours' duration; and, under the direction of a venerable compotator, who has shared the sports and festivity of three generations, the frolicsome company has begun to practise the "ancient and now forgotten pastime of High Jinks. This game was played in several different ways. Most frequently the dice were thrown by the company, and those upon whom the lot fell were obliged to assume and maintain, for a time, a certain fictitious character, or to repeat a certain number of fescennine verses in a particular order. If they departed from the character assigned, or if their memory proved treacherous in the repetition, they incurred forfeits, which were either compounded for by swallowing an additional bumper, or by paying a small sum towards the reckoning. At this sport the jovial company were closely engaged, when Mannering entered the room.

"Mr. Counsellor Pleydell, such as we have described him, was enthroned, as a monarch, in an elbow-chair, placed on the dining-table, his scratch wig on one side, his head crowned with a bottle-slider, his eye leering with an expression betwixt fun and the effects of wine, while his court around him resounded with such crambo scraps of verse as these:

1

Where's Gerunto now?, and what's become of him?

Gerunto's drown'd because he could not swim, &c. &c.

"Such, O Themis, were anciently the sports of thy Scottish children! Pleydell turned his head, and blushed a little when he saw the English stranger. He was, however, of the opinion of Falstaff, 'Out, ye villains, play out the play!' wisely judging it the better way to appear totally unconcerned."

The play played out, Pleydell's himself again, in his professional capacity. Serious business seriously mooted, he flings away his crown, and descends from his altitude. In less than two minutes he has washed his hands and face, settled his wig in the glass, and, to Mannering's great surprise, now looks quite a different man from the childish Bacchanal on the table. "There are folks," he says, "Mr. Mannering, before whom one should take care how they play the fool-because they have either too much malice, or too little wit, as the poet says. The best compliment I can pay Colonel Mannering, is to show I am not ashamed to expose myself before him." And when after a grave and lengthened conference