whether by fact or fancy. No minds entirely divorce the two, or can divorce them, even if they evince the spiritual part of their faculties in doing nothing better than taking a fancy to a teacup or a hat: and Nature, we may be assured, intended that we should receive pleasure from the associations of ideas, as well as from images tangible; for all mankind, more or less, do so. The great art is to cultivate impressions of the pleasant sort; just as a man will raise wholesome plants in his garden, and not poisonous ones.

A bricklayer's tools may illustrate a passage in Shakespeare. One of them is called a bevel, and is used to cut the under-side of bricks to a required angle. "Bevel" is a sort of irregular square.

At my abuses, reckon up their own.

I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel."

Sonnet cxxi.

We shall conclude this paper with two brick-laying anecdotes, one of which has more manner than matter; but there is an ease in it, very comforting, when we reflect upon the laboriousness of the occupation in a hot day. And this reminds us, that, in considering the bricklayer, we must not forget how many of his hours he passes in a world of his own, though in the streets, pacing on scaffolding, descending and ascending ladders, living on the outsides of houses, betwixt ground-floors and garrets or the sun, now catching a breeze unknown to us prisoners of the pavement. We have heard of a bricklayer who was a somnambulist by daytime, and used to go on

with his work in that state, along the precipices of parapet - walls, overlooking us from the top,- now burning in and the nice points of tops of ladders. But to our anecdotes.

An acquaintance of ours was passing a street in which Irish bricklayers were at work; when he heard one of them address, from below, another who was sending him baskets down by a rope. "Lour asy,

wou'd you?" said he; meaning that his friend was to lower the baskets in a style less hasty and inconvenient. "Lour asy!" exclaimed the other, in a tone indignant at having the quiet perfection of his movements called in question, and in the very phraseology of which we seem to hear the Hibernian elevation of his eyebrows, as well as the rough lightness of his voice, - -"I lour so asy, I don't know how I lour."

The other story appears to us to exhibit the very prince of bulls, the prize animal in that species of cattle. An Irish laborer laid a wager with another, that the latter could not carry him up the ladder to the top of a house in his hod, without letting him fall. Agreed. The hod is occupied, the ladder ascended : there is peril at every step. Above all, there is life and the loss of the wager at the top of the ladder; death and success below! The house-top is reached in safety the wagerer looks humbled and disappointed. "Well," said he, " you have won; there is no doubt of that: worse luck to you another time! But, at the third story, I had hopes."

:

A RAINY DAY.

OUR, pour, pour! There is no hope of its leaving off," says a lady, turning away from the window: 66 you must make up your mind, Louisa, to stay at home, and lose your romps, and have a whole frock to sit in at dinner, and be very unhappy with mamma.”

“No, mamma, not that; but don't you think it will hold up? Look, the kennels are not quite so bad; and those clouds - they are not so heavy as they were. It is getting quite light in the sky."

"I am afraid not," says the lady, at once grave and smiling. "But you are a good girl, Louisa: give me a kiss. We will make the day as happy as we can at home. I am not a very bad play-fellow, you know, for all I am so much bigger and older."

"O mamma! you know I never enjoy my cousins' company half so much, if you don't go with me; but (here two or three kisses are given and taken, the lady's hands holding the little girl's cheeks, and her eyes looking fondly into hers, which are a little wet)

- but — but don't you think we really shall be able to go? don't you think it will hold up?" And here the child returns to the window.

"No, my darling: it is set in for a rainy day. It

has been raining all the morning: it is now afternoon ; and we have, I fear, no chance whatever."

"The puddles don't dance quite as fast as they did," says the little girl.

"But hark!" says the lady: "there's a furious dash of water against the panes."

"T!!" quoth the little girl against her teeth: "dear me! It's very bad indeed! I wonder what Charles and Mary are thinking of it."

“Why, they are thinking just as you are, I dare say; and doing just as you are, very likely, making their noses flat and numb against the glass."

- –

The little girl laughs, with a tear in her eye; and mamma laughs, and kisses her, and says, "Come: as you cannot go to see your cousins, you shall have a visitor yourself. You shall invite me and Miss Nayler to dinner, and sit at the head of the table in the little room; and we will have your favorite pudding, and no servant to wait on us. We will wait on ourselves, little child, and behave well; and you shall tell papa, when he comes home, what a nice and I will try to be a very great, good, big girl I was.”

"Oh, dear, mamma! that will be very pleasant. What a nice, kind mamma you are! and how afraid I am to vex you, though you do play and romp with me!"

"Good girl! But-ah! you need not look at the window any more, my poor Louisa. Go, and tell cook about the pudding; and we will get you to give us a glass of wine after it, and drink the health of your cousins, so as to fancy them partaking it with us; and Miss Nayler and I will make fine speeches, and re

turn you their thanks; and then you can tell them

about it, when you go

"O dear, dear, dear

very nice that will be!

next time."

mamma! so I can; and how And I'll go this instant about

the pudding: and I don't think we could go as far as Welland's now, if the rain did hold up; and the puddles are worse than ever."

And so off runs little fond-heart and bright-eyes, happy at dining in fancy with her mother and cousins all at once, and almost feeling as if she had but exchanged one holiday for another.

The sight of mother and daughter has made us forget our rainy day. Alas! the lady was right, and the little child wrong; for there is no chance of to-day's clearing up. The long-watched and interesting puddles are not indeed "worse than ever," not suddenly hurried and exasperated, as if dancing with rage at the flogging given them: they are worse even than that; for they are everlastingly the same,—the same full, twittering, dancing, circle-making overflowings of gutter which they have been ever since five in the morning, and which they mean to be, apparently, till five to-morrow.

Wash, wash, wash! The window- panes, weltering and dreary and rapid, and misty with the rain, are like the face of a crying child who is afraid to make a noise, but who is resolved to be as 66 aggravating" as possible with the piteous ostentation of his wet cheeks; weeping with all his might, and breathing, with wide-open mouth, a sort of huge, wilful, everlasting sigh, by way of accompaniment. Occasionally he puts his hand over to his ear,-hollow, –