"'Ot's no name for it. I have lost punds of flesh since I have been in this Paris; and nearly broke my wind toiling up those steps at our place. What did we come for, Bartholomew ?"

"Well, that is a good 'un, ain't it, Lucy? We come for? Ha! ha! ha!" answered the husband.

"Paris is worth seeing," said Tom, endeavouring to dispel the domestic quarrel he saw brewing. "Transit is now-a-days so easy, so economical, and so well arranged, that every one travels. It enlarges the mind, improves the understanding, and dispels prejudices. Our parliamentary debates have improved much of late, especially in the Lords', and I attribute it to this cause."

"Glad you think So,

familias.

for it is more than I do," growled the pater

Tom thought his new acquaintance a particularly morose bear of a peer; but, as it was the first of the genus he had ever known, it might improve upon acquaintance, and be, like poor Hook's simile of a pineapple, rough without, but rich within.'

66

"Do you know Lady Georgina St. Cloud is going to marry Lord Knifenfaulk?" said Tom, turning to the young lady. "She is a daughter of Lady Southerly. Do you know her?"

"We know Lady Southerley, don't we, pa?"

"Of course," thought Tom, "they do.'

66

Ah, that we do," growled the papa; and then came forth something like an oath, and a muttering of "forty-two pounds some shillings-all gone."

"I saw the trousseau at Madame Feval's. It is very handsome." "Does that madame ever expect to be paid?" inquired the lady, angrily.

"I never take the liberty of prying into any one's private affairs, my lady," said Tom, evidently offended.

'Cos if she does she will find out her mistake, except the gent pays after marriage."

GENT! Is this the playful relaxation style of the aristocracy when unshackled with the cares of state? What a different creature he is in reality to what he is represented! As different as the stout, vulgar, Frenchman "Milord Jacques Bull," with a large scarlet gingham umbrella, represented on the stage, to the quiet, gentlemanly, unassuming Englishman, master of every art and every politesse, who takes his ticket from the London-bridge station to Paris!

Of course we all of us know—at least those of us who have travelled— and which of us have not? Show me the man, and I shall e'en be obliged to you. It would be as fine an animal curiosity as the hippopotamus at the Zoological Gardens. As I have said, of course we all of us know that we always dine at Amiens en route; and if the day is hot, which by nature it is in summer and the beginning of autumn, and the soup is of "good stock"-for further definition vide our worthy hero of gastronomy, Monsieur Soyer-and we are hungry, which is somehow inevitably the case in railway travelling

The reason why I cannot tell

and we English drink brandy vice vin ordinaire, it becomes, on the

score of probability, that we have a post-prandial slumber. The papa settled into a heavy, high-sounding, uncomfortable sleep, muttering forth "hidden sayings" of unpaid tavern bills; mamma became purple and scarlet, like a full-blown peony, and her front somehow got all awry, and the black band (which invariably acts as a sort of conventional buoy to point out the rocks of time) had almost slipped down on her nose, and her ears became ticklish, and her rouge diluvial-until she also settled into a plethoric sleep, and therefore, as a well-trained writer would say, "the young folk were left to themselves."

Lucy was a young, gushing, romantic thing, brought up at a ladies' seminary in Hammersmith; volatile and playful, and silly and ready to fall in love at any moment. In short, she had been severely punished twice, by four pages of "Johnson's Dictionary," to learn by rote each time, for a clandestine correspondence with Master Shoebuckle, the knock-kneed youth at Dr. Blimbertoe's Institute, on the opposite side of the road.

"Ou-der-yer-feel?

t

-now?" inquired Tom, nervously running his words into one another, as he performed an imaginary washing of hands.

"Alas! the same as ever," replied Lucy, sentimentally.

The beginning did not augur well for the end "of a free intercourse of sentiment!"

Limit of space precludes me from following up the course of love from its source even to its end. Suffice it then for me to chronicle, that before the guard called for their tickets at Boulogne, and before papa and mamma had awoke to thorough consciousness, Lucy was "the affianced bride" of our hero, Tom Baldwin. Not that I by any means wish to draw a moral, by advocating these high-pressure, locomotive, sixty-miles-an-hour marriages, as they are very often liable to prove very adventurous ones. For the pretty blue-eyed damsel, who has such a neat foot and ankle, and such a ravishing little bonnet, and who is travelling the whole journey without any one to assist or protect her, is not exactly, on a railroad acquaintance, the fair creature you and I would like to take to our bosoms, for better or for worse, and make her the future mistress of our house and heart, except you are perfectly impervious to consequences and public opinion.

cannot really detail the bad night, the rocking to and fro, the nervousness, and the trepidation, all mingled with certain sea-qualms of sickness of the morrow, the two loving and faithful creatures underwent after they had plighted their troths in the railway-carriage, according to the most approved fashion, judging from our play-books and lighter style of novels. Young) 16.1. &

V

Good morning! Glad to see you up so early. Hope you are going over in our vessel. I never eat anything afore I go to sea; it is some two to three shillings entirely thrown away to the little fishes," said the pater familias, as Tom Baldwin entered the coffee-room of the hotel, intending to make a clean breast of it.

"Yes, my lord, I am.'

Why the deuce and all do you call me a lord? It is bad enough to be belorded so by these Frenchified parties, without hearing a mother's ir own country jabber such nonsense.hout hearing, a mother's

son of our

VOL. XXIV.

M

am no

lord."

"Sir, I beg pardon. I understood you were."

"Bosh! What should put such an idea as that into your head, eh ?” Oh, the guard told me you were one; and the coronet on your carriage led me to believe it."

66

Haw, haw, haw! I told Lucy that would get us into some confounded scrape or mistake. Haw, haw, haw! So you took me for a lord? What, a real live swell? None of your Scotch paper chaps, or Irish broken-down twopenny-halfpenny scamps, with twenty thousand a year in the Encumbered Estates Court, eh? but a good, solvent, honourable, British nob-eh? Well, well, well; wonders, sure, will never cease! No, no, my lad, I am no lord; though as far as honesty goes, and twenty shillings in the pound goes, and uprightness and fair dealing is concerned, there be none of them swells that need be ashamed of having me amongst their order. No; I am plain Thomas Brown, landlord of the Crown Inn in Canterbury, where, having made by honesty, attention, diligence, and economy, a comfortable fortune, am about to retire on a property I have just purchased in Kent. Before doing so I wanted to collect in all my accounts, and especially my bad debts. Hearing Lady Southerley was in Paris, who owed me a tick of near fifty pounds for post-horses for dragging her heavy chariot to all the fêtes and pic-nics in the country, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, and combine pleasure and business together, show my missus and Lucy Paris, and collect my little outstanding accounts. So we bundled into one of our hack-shays, with the old sign on the boards, for I am not ashamed of it, and set off for Paris. I saw Lady Southerley; but of course, beyond her fine self, and her fine feathers, and her fine bigotry, as she calls her jewels, and her lisping, and smiles, and long words, and orders to come to her rent-day, when my claim should be settled immediately, I never saw the colour of her money. Her rentday! I should like to know where her property is—in the skies, I think. She be"

66

Messieurs, you have not five minutes to lose. De ladies and de fourgon are aboard. Il faut-you must make haste for de permits-the bell rings-hurry, hurry!" exclaimed an excited porter, looking in at the coffee-room door.

There is little more to be told. The course of "true love" did run as smooth as the Serpentine on a hot summer's day, and our hero, Tom Baldwin, married the "fair and accomplished Lucy Brown, and again returned to Manchester with his "lovely bride," a wiser and a better man, but without the object of his ambition being obtained-the acquaintance of a lord. Time works wonders, and it succeeded in working Lucy into a staid, sensible matron, and Tom, with his great wealth, into a useful member of society. He gave up the folly of his youth, and some few years after, the newspapers told us that at a meeting, "Lord Worthytown in the chair, Thomas Baldwin, Esq., &c., &c., being present," it was agreed to found a Mechanics' Institute in Manchester. Again I read his name, and very sound remarks, at a meeting held in Liverpool on Secular Education, where the Earl of Crediton presided; and I verily believe the Mr. Thomas Baldwin the Athenæum mentions as one of the party at Lord Rosse's last literary conversazione was our quondam hero, Tom.

THE YANKEE GAMBLER.

AMIDST the varied groups that usually attend the departure of a steamer, or amongst those that crowd the deck, there are some who, from their dwarfish or dignified appearance, their phiz or their form, their dress or their dishabille, become objects of observation. On the deck of the steamer just leaving Vera Cruz for New Orleans might have been observed a man, in height about six feet two, whose thin, pale features told of recent illness, and for an inhabitant of the country it was easy to perceive that he had been attacked with one of those malignant fevers incidental to the climate, which drags one almost to the threshold of death, and then allows them just as lingeringly to return to life. He wore a blue serge coat, and trousers of the same material, and a large Panama hat threw a sickly yellow shade over his features. A close observer might have noticed him shudder as he pulled his coat somewhat tighter around him, although a tropical sun poured down its rays with unabated ardour. Amidst the tumult that pervaded the scene, he alone seemed unmindful to the Spaniards tapping each other on the back, after the manner of mothers coaxing up some obstreperous article of food; to a fat little man making vociferous gesticulations; to a Spaniard on the shore, who is philosophically looking at some other object; to three men, with complexions very much like scraped pigs, who are having a friendly quarrel amongst themselves; to an individual who looks somewhat like a Guerilla, and who appears to be estimating the value of the captain's gilt buttons; but he seems impatient at the delay of the steamer, and mutters a curse 'twixt his thin lips each time as he removes his cigar to allow the smoke to escape. The captain sings out "Turn ahead!" the engineer's boy echoes Turn ahead!" at whose magic voice two ponderous wheels go splash! splash! as each float descends into the blue water, and comes up dripping, ready only for another plunge, and away merrily goes the steamer; in a few hours the land is scarce visible, yet the passengers, unwilling to lose the last faint outline of terra firma, stand watching intensely the departing view.

There is something approaching a feeling of melancholy in receding from a spot one may never see again, and we look at it as on some old friend and protector who is gradually being snatched from us. When the land is fairly gone, each eye involuntarily seeks the deck, and men feel they are dependent, and at the mercy of one another; the cold bar of ceremony is removed, and confidence replaces any former sentiment, and each and all have an intuitive feeling that they are "alone on the deep." Alone on the deep! There is a pathos in those words that sounds discordant to the ear on some occasions, when the black night rolls in, and the white foam lashes the ship, as if indignant at the obstruction to its unruly course. 'Tis one thing then to feel "alone on the deep;" but when the zephyrs gently agitate the calm surface of the sea, and the moon's beams kiss the ocean, when away from the tumult and din of the world, and all is peace and stillness around, then it is another thing to feel" alone on the deep." It was one of these nights which followed our departure, when, as Longfellow writes, "the moon's reflection looked like some silver goblet dropped in the ocean;" and as the massive wheels flew round, throwing off at intervals the phosphorescent

water, which, falling into the sea, appeared like lamps sinking down to lighten the halls of the departed, I paced the deck alone, with the exception of the watch for the night. The bell striking informed me that it was the tenth hour of the evening, and I turned to descend the companion-ladder. As I was just placing my foot on the step, I perceived a person coming up the fore-hatch, who I recognised immediately as the stranger I had observed from the wharf, and determining to know more of him, I resumed my walk, and in passing wished him good evening, to which he scarcely replied, and then crossed to the other side of the deck. I followed him, and renewed the conversation by asking him if the cotton crops were good, thinking he might be a merchant going over to purchase, it being the season.

He replied to my question. I then said,

66

Going across to New Orleans ?"

"Hum! I am."

"Going over to purchase, I presume?"

"Going over to die," muttered he, as he stared me full in the face. This sudden and extraordinary reply quite unnerved me, and I should have fallen, had I not been supported by the bulwark. Before I had time to recover, he laid his hand on my shoulder.

Friend," said he, "I'll tell you a tale, and don't interrupt me,—no other living soul will hear it from my lips."

He then commenced a rapid recitation of the following: "Some forty years ago, amidst the swamps of New Orleans, I first breathed the impure and pestilential atmosphere. My father was a man of exceedingly lax principles; in fact, drink had been his ruin. My mother died of grief four years after my birth; and it may be supposed, left so young as I was with a man little short of a demon when in a drunken fit, the education inculcated was not of the highest order of ethics. However, I learnt to read and write, and made fast progress in that species of low cunning incidental to a certain class of population. At the age of twelve I pocketed all the loose cash I could find, and made myself scarce. For thirty years from that time I have led a roving life, living comme il faut, the telling of which would involve certain private matters; but to the incident which brought me here. Six months since, chance, fate, or misfortune found me at Baltimore; and one evening I entered the gambling-house I frequented, in order to retrieve, if possible, my losses of the previous night, determining to play high. I was in an extremely sullen mood from a combination of circumstances which had gone against me. I took my accustomed seat at the table, and staked a considerable amount; the throw was against me, and I lost; whilst, as the banker swept the money towards him, a long sneering laugh proceeded from some one close by. I staked again and again, and at each successive loss this long 'Ha! ha!' followed, but without my discovering the individual, for the intensity of the game and the amounts had fully engrossed my attention. I felt excessively enraged both at the losses and the horrid laugh which arose each time. The next I staked extremely low, in order to observe the person, and that my attention might not be attracted by the large amount on the card. That time I won! and if I had staked on that occasion at the same rate as previously I had done, I should have been a winner of some four hundred pounds, but as it was I only gained a trifle. He saw this, and laughed louder than before;