him. He raised his head and scratched it, and just at that time the ladies and gentlemen who were along with him began to amuse themselves by talking to, that is, screaming at one another. Our puzzled acquaintance was a persevering man, however, and he determined to go over the passage again. To help him to do so to more purpose, he took a piece of paper from his pocket which he folded straight; and then recommenced, holding his paper-assistant parallel with, and just below, the line he was reading. By this means he got on more steadily, and the passage assumed to Mr. Johnson's senses the following form, with this difference: I make a distinction as to source and person, while to Mr. J. all appeared to emanate from the author of " Tristram Shandy :"

Sterne-Nay, if you come to that, sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting

1st. Gentleman-Lord Palmerston and

1st. Lady-Such a duck of a shawl that—

Sterne-Solomon himself

2nd. Gentleman-Speaking of our foreign policy made this remark2nd. Lady-I always thought a Cashmere shawl, real Cashmere, mind you, looked better than anything. But, I forgot to tell you, you have not seen my little dogs, Fido and Dido?

Sterne-Have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES

2nd. Lady-Positively the most sagacious animals

1st. Lady-Indeed! You ought to give them every morningSterne-Their running-horses-their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles their pallets-their maggots and their butterflies

1st. Gentleman-And the balance of power becomes disarranged2nd. Gentleman—But so long as the Sultan

Sterne-Rides his HOBBY-HORSE

Here Mr. Johnson felt himself becoming distracted very fast. He thought Sterne must be some madman whom he was not sane enough to fathom; so he took one of the wisest steps he had taken since he left home, and put the book in the inside pocket of his over-coat, promising himself to look into it again when he had arrived at his journey's end. The manner in which he afterwards deported himself on his way merits the highest encomium, and is throughout pregnant with the most valuable hints to travellers. It says more for itself than my pen could by any means say for it; and I do not doubt my readers will thank me for allowing our friend's conduct to speak in its own behalf, without any puff. A proper study of it is calculated to be of especial use to a large number of travellers, who though, perhaps, not going the hog quite to the length of Mr. Johnson, yet evince every inclination and every ability to do so in time. May the account that here follows assist to speed them forward.

Mr. Johnson would sink the hermetical reserve of a reader and make himself pleasant and sociable; so he cut the second gentleman short in a dissertation he was delivering on the Emperor of Russia, by saying, "It's a fine day, sir;" just so. And then, before the second gentleman could reply, our friend turned to the first gentleman, and said, "Don't you think so, mister?" and, without waiting for an answer to that, looked at the first lady, nodded, and called out, "How are you, ma'am?" to her; and then, addressing the second lady, inquired, " And

how are you?" Having accomplished this rapid feat, his face assumed a cheerful hue, and he examined the ceiling of the carriage with that selfsatisfied air which naturally takes possession of a man when he feels that he has at one and the same time been the polite thing to gentlemen and the agreeable rattle to ladies.

But the affable shopkeeper's affability was not duly appreciated, I regret to say. The females continued their converse without deigning to bestow upon their interrogator so much as a look. The men did look, and heartily one of them applying his glass to his eye and staring at Mr. Johnson apparently in the wildest amazement. But our man was not to be cowed. Indeed, he revelled, above all things, in the assurance that if he had had a chance at any time, he could have stared Argus himself completely out of countenance. And so he made the best use he could of his eyes, and returned the man's stare, with compound interest added to it. Mr. Johnson triumphed; the gentleman gave in; and again brought the Czar to his aid: and very glad he was to have such aid, the conqueror flattered himself. Mr. Johnson set it down in his own mind that he had got into the company of muffs; yet he would let them see he was wholly unembarrassed, and a devil-may-care individual, with the spice of the gallant in his composition-this latter to engage the women. He assumed at once an extremely careless posture, whistled the Ghost Melody in the "Corsican Brothers," out of tune-and then, to catch the attention of the ladies, sang. I don't know the air, but am authorised to state that the song chosen for the occasion was highly appropriate, and that its opening line was

Here's to the maid of bashful fifteen.

Oh! could she have heard him, what would Mrs. Johnson have said, I wonder, to his carrying on in that way?

Nobody evinced any interest in his proceedings; yet he, being conversant with human nature, knew well that he had astonished them—a bit. Therefore, having exhausted his musical abilities, he was quiet for a time.. In fact, to show them how easy in his mind he was, he fell asleep. But he awoke at every station to pursue a course of Railway Reading more facile to himself and more annoying to his companions, who deserved it, than that in which he had at first indulged. It consisted in rushing to the window, regardless of people's knees, and looking out to read on the large painted board the name of the town they had come to: and he went valiantly on with this course of study, and would have gone further, but at the end of one of these perusals he pulled out his pocket-pistol and imbibed some of its ammunition, and then, to show he bore no malice, asked one of the ladies if she would drink; but one of the gentlemenNo. 2-upon this looked at him so ferociously that Johnson again suddenly fell asleep, and did not awake until he heard the porters calling out, "A quarter of an hour allowed here, for refreshment." He got out of the carriage, and so did the others, and he never saw them more.

Not here, however, did his playfulness and good-humour stop. From stationing himself opposite a young lady, a waitress at the refreshmentroom, and calling out to her, very loud, "Cup corfee," and throwing down, also very loud, a sixpence in payment; to complimenting said young lady (injured Mrs. Johnson!) to an old strange gentleman, by saying, in a tone audible to her, "Devilish fine girl! that;" from walk

ing about the platform eating a sausage-roll, and looking as he did so as hungry as the complete sets of teeth one sees exhibited at a dentist's door; to following up his Railway Reading by perusing the direction of all the luggage he saw lying about; and finally getting into an empty carriage and smoking all the way, because he knew it was prohibited; his volatility never forsook him. And when he reached his journey's end, he again drew forth his "Tristram Shandy," and the mysterious passage, as he sat by the fireside, assumed the following plain and simple form:

66

Nay, if you come to that, sir, have not the wisest of men in all agesnot excepting Solomon himself—have they not had their HOBBY-HORSES, their running-horses, their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets, their maggots, and their butterflies? And so long as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peaceably and quietly along the king's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him-pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?"

And so the new title should be, "Railway Reading for the Fireside.

THE YOUTH AT THE FOUNTAIN.
FROM SCHILLER.

By the fountain sat the stripling,
Weaving from the flowers a wreath;
And he saw them hurried onwards
In the brawling stream beneath.
Even thus, as flows the fountain,
Speeds my restless life away,
And my youthful days are fleeting
Like the garland's fast decay!
Ask not wherefore I am mournful

In the fresh bloom of my years;
All is full of hope and gladness

When the new spring reappears.
But, alas! the thousand voices
That with vernal nature start,
Only waken tones of sadness

In my drear and heavy heart!
What to me are all the pleasures
Wafted with the hours of May,
While I sigh for one dear spirit,
Ever near, yet far away?
Could these longing arms extended
Clasp this worshipp'd form of air!
But they never may embrace it,
And my soul glooms in despair!

Oh, descend, thou lovely idol,
Leave thy stately castle hall;
Spring flowers flung from my fond fingers
Shall in thy loved bosom fall!

Hear the woods with wild notes warble,

And fresh fountains flowing fair;

Room hath e'en the smallest cabin

For a blissful, loving pair!

IS HE A DOCTOR?

BY MRS. Ꭼ Ꭰ Ꮃ Ꭺ Ꭱ Ꭰ THOMA S.

OLI. Why, what would you?

IV.

Vor. Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of condemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Holla your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, Olivia!

Twelfth Night.

WHEN Thomas asserted that he met Doctor Sanders in the street, he did not speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; for he might have said that he met him at the door of his master's house; for, scarcely had he crossed its threshold ere he was addressed with much courtesy by a gentleman, and evidently a stranger in the neighbourhood, who began questioning the ingenuous Thomas respecting the locality, and also the object of his apparent haste; and when told that he was in search of a doctor, ANY doctor, he, almost seizing the hand of the communicative domestic in his delight at the fortunate circumstance, declared "that he was a doctor, Doctor Sanders, and that he was ready to undertake the case, and cure it." He then, while pretending to scrape his feet, elicited every particular of Mrs. Watson's malady, with every other matrimonial incident necessary to render him au fait in the treatment of her disorder; and the modus operandi which he was to adopt in establishing an intimacy and keeping it in the Agapemone containing the idol of his heart; for, that the ci-devant Doctor Sanders was the Protean lover of the fair Charlotte, our sapient readers must have already divined. But, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Watson must possess their perspicacity à present, or blighted hopes and ruined fortune would succeed their penetration. Happily for our hero, the complaint which challenged his medical acumen was not of a nature to betray his pathological ignorance, as the indefinite application of the high-sounding terms Neurotonics-the derangement of the medullary cords-those delicate agents of sensation and volition, would be more than sufficient to awaken a full credence in the profundity of his knowledge, and serve him, as they did many a more dangerous empiric, as a diploma of imposition and quackery. Happily also for him, Monsieur le mari of la malade imaginaire, was the most unsuspicious of mortal men, and consequently, would believe, au pied de la lettre, all he chose to advance; but Charlotte's sense of perception was not so opaque, and her maid, the lynx-eyed Maria, was perfectly atrocious in her perspicience-a very female Argus to guard his Io. But, as it is the only le premier pas qui coûte, he had made that. And now, coûte qui coûte, follow he must in the onward path, whether for joy or for sorrow. Hoping the former-devoutly hoping it—

But love will hope where reason would despair.

When Mr. Watson, after taking leave of the doctor, announced to his

wife that he had invited him to dinner on that very day, Mrs. Watson, with her customary self-esteem-the organ of which was most largely developed-naturally concluded that it was solely out of consideration to her own preconceived prepossession for that polite and polished individual, and she was therefore much gratified by the delicate demonstration; but, on a little more mature reflection, "it struck her as rather strange that her husband should ask a gentleman to dinner without consulting her as to the expediency of such a matter—and such a gentleman, tooone, if he had a grain of manly courage-a spark of manly defiance left, he ought to detest and despise for had not that very shortly to be fêted and honoured guest, only just a few hours since endeavoured to render him, her husband, a nonentity- -a cipher-a craven coward-a slave to her every arbitrary dictate? Was he then so base as to lick the hand which corrected him? Oh! was she united to a creature so abject-so servile-so mean in spirit, as to fawn upon the oppressor ? Or was there some league, some compact, some understanding between them, of which she was kept in ignorance? No, no, oh, no! that was impossible. She knew all the depths and shallows of Watson's open-hearted nature, for she had plumbed them over and over again, and therefore defied any springes he might set to catch woodcocks. Still it was an act of innovation-of insubordination-a trenching on her rights and privileges which must be checked on the instant-nipped in the bud, or she would gradually degenerate into the mere wife.”

So, in her usual way, she expressed her usual disapprobation of anything which he dared to judge as proper, expecting his usual submission and apologies-but, mirabile dictu! for once, he wavered not, but coolly and obstinately maintained his point-which was, "that as he had asked the doctor to dine, dine he should, whether she approved of his doing so or not."

Mrs. Watson was far too genuinely surprised at this vigorous display of connubial authority, to even think of getting up a scene; nor could she treat it as a jest, for truth-for earnest was stamped on the altered brow of her resolute husband; her Watson-her David-her tool, was changed-awfully, horribly changed-she could only then determine to be sullen and disagreeable to the odious object who had wrought this difference, in the late so plastic puppet whose strings she pulled at will.

Charlotte was equally amazed at the information, unable to comprehend, with all his powers of fascination, how her rusé lover had succeeded in ingratiating himself into the regard of her guardian, as, with almost ⚫ the "presto" of the legerdemainist, to be admitted into the familiarity of a friend and companion; and she, piqued at his progressing so far and so favourably without her assistance or consent, concluded, too, to make him feel that, although he had gained an entrance into her present abode, he was still liable to a hasty and ignominious ejectment; for she was really highly indignant at the stratagem he had employed to effect that invasion, and also at the nonchalant ease and assurance with which he had conducted himself after his triumph, and, more than all, for his not endeavouring to seek an opportunity of assuring her that she, and she alone, was the sole cause of the bold enterprise; for although she knew that she was, as certainly as if he had sworn it at her feet,