in fiction, and would therefore be sure of a good reception. One part of the principles of social life, which has never been apprehended by novelists, and is little observed by men generally, but is a most important thing in our ordinary experiences, is that regarding the feelings which actuate us in the formation of acquaintanceships and friendships. There is here not merely ignorance, but much positive mistake. When Smith and his family decline the offered society of Jones and Jones's family, there is never any other presumption in Jones than that Smith has been determined in the matter wholly by some external considerations, as that Jones is a man of comparatively little means or influence, and that there is to be nothing gained in the eye of the world by knowing him. When Brown chances to be drawn on by fortune to a prominent and brilliant position, and gets new friends, then are all his old ones jealous if he abates in the least in the attentions he formerly paid them, as understanding that he now looks down upon them. Now the truth may be, nay, generally is, that Smith finds Jones and his connections unfitted to his tastes, or moving in a wholly different round of sympathies and interests, and very naturally reserves himself for friends who are in these respects more suitable. So also when Brown's position in life is changed, he necessarily comes into contact with new people, who must in a great measure engross any time he has to bestow on social pleasures; without any failure of good feeling towards old acquaintances, he cannot give so much time to them, perhaps cannot give any; one thing, in short, is superseded by another. Or with changed circumstances have come changed tastes and new sympathies; so he no longer finds the enjoyment he did in the society of those old acquaintances. Surely, in a world so full of change, this should not excite very much surprise. And there is surely no great difficulty in seeing how it all comes about. Community of tastes, sympathies, and interests mainly determine us in all these matters. Yet there is no subject on which the truth seems more screened from the common view. For much of what is complained of in the common world on these subjects, there is a ground in rationality, if our self-love would only allow us to see it. When Hugh Miller rose from his original condition of a stone-mason to be a leader of public opinion and a cultivator of literature and science, could his old fellow-workers have reasonably expected him to associate as much with them as ever? No one who knew the man can doubt that he would continue to regard them with kindness, that he would be willing to help and serve them within reasonable bounds, and that any particular old favourite would be as sure of a shake of his horny hand as ever, when accident threw them together. But it was manifestly impossible for Miller to be both what he now was and what he once was. Circumstances were changed, and he was changed with them. He had new associates, suitable to his present frame of intellectual and moral being, and he could not also keep up on the original terms with the old, for the two were wholly incompatible. It chances that another man of genius, who rose about the same time from humble life to an equally high level in one of the fine arts, endeavoured, from a misjudging good-nature, to keep up with his old associates, instead of adopting new ones more suitable to his altered circumstances, and the consequence was that he got into wholly false positions, and was utterly deranged in his course of life. In an early state of society, such a man would have been quite safe with all his genius and its éclat; but the world chances to be some thousands of years old, and it has in the course of time crystallised into social forms and rules which we cannot transgress with impunity. There is, we suspect, another mistake in the views of Mr Jones and his compeers on matters of this kind. He considers Smith as having been formerly on his own level in mind and tastes, as well as in worldly circumstances, and complains accordingly as if there were no cause for the alienation but a change in the latter. But perhaps Smith was all the time a man of higher powers as well as higher tendencies, thrown by the mere accident of fortune into Jones's society, and good-naturedly to a certain extent enduring it, while aspiring to something better. The very progressiveness of some men, as compared with others, progressiveness in tastes above all, would account for much of that gradual separation which is continually seen taking place between them, without the necessity of presuming any lack of constancy or of kindly feeling in one of the parties. It is strange, while by our adage, ‘a man is known by his associates,' we practically acknowledge that men choose their society by elective affinity, and have a right to do so, that we should at the same time leave our neighbours so little freedom in the choice. There is no privilege of humanity in which there is more interference, more foolish censure, more want of reasonable judgment. Poor Smith and his womankind cannot make a single move in the social world, but the Joneses are upon him, misconstruing all his motives and aims, and this for no observable reason but that the Joneses would believe in anything before they would believe that there was any point of ineligibility about themselves. Mrs Smith never projects a dinner-party in perfect freedom. 'We have not room for the Joneses; they might be asked at another time; but then they will take offence if omitted from a party where we are to have the Browns-they will think it is because the Browns have got a rise lately, and are thought their superiors.' So the plan of the party-and a party, to be successful, demands a plan has to be deranged and probably spoilt, in order to avoid giving offence in a quarter where there was no real occasion for taking it. Unfortunately, the acquaintances least appreciable for any attractive qualities, are just those who are always on the most ticklish terms with us, and therefore the most liable to be offended by any imagined slight; hence the most tyrannical over us, if we are good-natured enough to study and concede to them. We are disposed to form acquaintances under the influence of the elective affinity, and we have to bear all the consequences of being presumed to do so; but in how many cases have we our associates assigned to us without any choice in the matter! Our son, while absent with his regiment, marries a thoughtless girl of mean tastes and ideas, with whom the circle of her husband's relations can never be harmonious. Old Tomkins foolishly takes a second wife, whom he imposes on his grown-up children as a person they must respect, the fact being that, while having some inscrutable charm in his eyes, she is disagreeable in those of most other persons. Brothers and sisters bring wives and husbands into the field, whose affinity of feeling with their new relatives is a mere matter of chance: they may or may not be 'pleasant people.' Your partners in business bring you associates, who are not to be avoided, however much they may be disrelished. In such ways you become half-surrounded with people whom you would never think of choosing as friends from any community of sympathy or taste, or from any approbation or esteem. There is here matter for much serious consideration-how to 'get along with all these associates of accident. It is to be feared that the getting along is often of a halting kind, and that from this cause mainly spring those family quarrels which are remarked to be so much When Adam delved, and Eve span, bitterer than others. It would require great judg- | of male and female, were severally derived from Adam's ment, great patience, great good-nature, to steer spade and Eve's spindle. The lines, well through such difficulties, even where there are respectable qualities on both sides. Where it is otherwise, or even where there is simply a decided antagonism of disposition, the matter must be all but hopeless. Still we cling to the belief that a Christian tolerance-a subjection of the passing feelings to the rule of a high moral principle-a higher kind of goodbreeding-will avail much in softening away the worst difficulties of the kind. Is it want of width of view that is the matter with the novelists, that they let so much of both the comedy and the tragedy of real life slip past them unworked up? Or is there something owing to the exigencies of art? is it imperative that we always see, in their pages, the gifts of fortune avenged and redressed on a principle of contraries? Is there something in the mysterious abysm of human sympathies and antipathies, that makes us demand ridicule for the keepers of boarding-schools, a hateful description for a step-mother, and a pattern case of justice for a poor man at law? Perhaps so. But, if so, then we must pronounce that 'veluti in speculum' can never be an applicable motto for a book of fiction. formed the rallying-cry in many popular insurrections, as the people began to discover their own strength, and the hollow weakness of the feudal assumptions under which they were enslaved. The expulsion of our first parents from the garden of Eden was a favourite subject with the medieval sculptors and painters; and they almost invariably represented it in the following manner. Adam, as he passes out of the portal of the earthly paradise, receives, with an air of the most abject submission, a spade from the hands of an attendant angel; while Eve, already supplied with spinning materials, and apparently quite unabashed, holding up her head as if she had done no wrong, boldly struts forth, carrying her distaff, and twirling the spindle as she walks along. This bold demeanour, attributed to Eve, may be one of the unjust and petty slurs against the female character which the artists of the period delighted to perpetrate; or it may denote her confidence that the evil would eventually be remedied, that through her progeny the serpent's head would ultimately be crushed. In one of the old religious plays, annually acted by the Franciscan friars on the festival of Corpus Christi, we find the same popular idea dramatically expressed. In the scene of the expulsion, Adam, with spade in hand, addressing Eve, says: Let us walk into the land, A YARN ABOUT SPINNING. SOME five-and-twenty years ago, when the reform agitation was at its height, we chanced to be in a small country town in the west of Scotland on the very day when an open-air meeting, followed by a grand procession, was held in favour of the popularly desired measure. Previous, however, to the procession starting, a hitch took place in the proceedings, caused by a difference of opinion on the important question of precedency. The gardeners, as 'old Adam's likeness,' claimed to lead the van, on account of the antiquity of to the word, and the word to the action, replies: their calling. On the other hand, the tailors, claiming a still higher antiquity, insisted on their incontrovertible right to the post of honour; asserting that Adam was not required to cultivate the earth until his expulsion from the garden of Eden, whereas, previous to that time, he had exercised the craft of a tailor, by sewing a garment of fig-leaves. Long and wordy were the arguments; both sides displaying that thorough knowledge of the sacred writings, which no other people possess in so remarkable a degree as the Scotch. At last, whether by dint of argument, numerical force, or their evident desire of pugnaciously pushing the dispute to the ultima ratio, the tailors gained their point, and, with waving banners and sounds of music, the procession started. That the arts of obtaining food and clothing have been practised from the earliest period, is a mere common-place truism known to all. Yet, while willingly admitting the great antiquity and usefulness of both gardeners and tailors, we must, nevertheless, assert that the human race is much more indebted to the spinsters, who, making the first advances in civilisation and refinement, relieved mankind from the necessity of wearing either leaves of trees or skins of beasts. Nor has the world been forgetful of the boon thus conferred upon it. The literature, proverbs, customs, superstitions, habits of thought, and modes of expression of most nations have reference to this important fact; while the distaff and spindle have been the type and symbol of female industry, and the natural insignia of the softer sex, in nearly every age and country. Among the many popular fancies of the middle ages, there was none so widely spread, or so firmly held, as the belief that Eve, the mother of mankind, was the first spinster. Those most mendacious of humbugs, the old heraldic writers, unblushingly assert that the shield and lozenge, the distinguishing armorial symbols With right hard labour our food to find, Eve, with her distaff and spindle, suiting the action Alas! that ever we wrought this sin- The allusions to spinning in the sacred writings are numerous and appropriate, pointing to the great antiquity of the art, as well as eulogising its professors. Abraham refused to take a thread of the spoil; flax was cultivated in the time of Moses; the women that were wise-hearted spun with their hands; those whose hearts stirred them up in wisdom spun goat's hair; and she, the virtuous woman par excellence, whose worth was above rubies, laid her hands to the distaff and the spindle. By the classical writers of Greece and Rome, Minerva, as the instructress of man in the useful arts, was fabled to be the inventress of spinning. Homer speaks of a distaff being a present fit for a queen; and everybody has heard of the labours of Penelope, though Valerius, in Coriolanus, spitefully enough, says, that all the yarn she spun in Ulysses' absence only served to fill Ithaca full of moths.' Herodotus relates a pleasing story respecting the removal, by Darius, of the Pæonian and neighbouring tribes to the shores of Asia. The Pæonian brothers caused their sister, dressed in her best attire, to pass before the Persian monarch, carrying a vase upon her head, and a distaff in her girdle, and leading a horse with her left hand, while she twirled her spindle with the right. The king's attention being attracted by this unusual appearance, he kept the young woman in view, and saw her approach a fountain, fill the vase, water the horse, and return spinning as before. Darius immediately asked to what country she belonged, and was told Pæonia. Were all the females of that country equally industrious? he next inquired, and was told that they were so. The result was that the politic monarch, considering that so diligent a people would be valuable subjects, had them all transported to his own territories in Asia. Pliny tells us that the distaff and spindle of Caia, the queen of Tarquinius Priscus, was long preserved in the Temple of Fortune. This royal spinstress was considered to be the perfect model of a good wife; hence a distaff, charged with wool, and a spindle, were carried before a Roman bride; and when the marriageprocession reached the husband's house, she was asked her name, to which she replied Caia. The three Fates, who, according to the ancient mythology, presided over man's mundane existence, were spinners; one held the distaff, another spun, the third cut the thread of life. Catullus, however, in his beautiful poem on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, describes all three as spinning. Affording an accurate description of the ancient mode of using the distaff and spindle, the lines are interesting: And as their hands the sacred labour plied, The left the distaff grasped, the right hand drew When the royal sepulchres of France, in the abbey of St Denis, were disgracefully desecrated at the period of the first revolution, several distaves and spindles, richly gilt, were found in the tombs of various queens. In Germany, it is still as customary to suspend a distaff and spindle over the tomb of a lady, as it is to place a sword and helmet over that of a knight. Pennant tells us that he saw a distaff, carved in stone, on the tomb of Alice, prioress of the nunnery of Emanuel, in Stirlingshire. The most remarkable instance of this kind in England is the tomb of Judge Оп Pollard, of the Common Pleas, who died in 1540. one side of the judge's tomb are the stone-carved effigies of his eleven stalwart sons, each girded with a sword; on the other, are represented his eleven fair daughters, each carrying a spindle. A curious story is related of the bustling housewife, the mother of those twenty and two children. When twenty only of them had been born, the lady, in commemoration of her large family, erected a magnificent painted window in her seat of Ninnet Bishop in Gloucestershire; and on this window she caused to be depicted herself and husband, with their ten sons and ten daughters. By some mistake, the artist left a blank space, which the lady ordered to be filled up by another son and daughter; and, as quaint old Fuller tells us, 'her expectancy came to pass in accordance.' A picture of Leda, on the wall of a house in Pompeii, About the very time when matronly Dame Pollard represents a female spinning in exactly the same man- was erecting her painted window, events of much ner as is described by the above lines; and the peasant-greater importance were in progress. The spinninggirls of Italy still carry the distaff and twirl the spindle, wheel that worked with the foot was invented, and in as they did in the time of Caia. Yet, long 'ere Romulus course of introduction into England. Previous to this and Remus had been suckled,' as we learn from paint- invention, spinning, though a most necessary art, was ings in the tombs of Beni-hassan, the yarn for the merely the occupation of female leisure; the employfine linen of Egypt' was spun in the same manner; ment of high and low, rich and poor, in the intervals and so do the wretched ophthalmia-stricken fellahs of of more important business, and during the long, Egypt still spin in the shade of the great pyramid. tedious nights of winter. Fitzherbert, a writer on Mummy has become merchandise, Pharaoh has been husbandry in the earlier part of Henry the VIII's sold for balsam, and, as that has gone out of fashion, reign, says: "Let thy distaff be always ready for a even the eagle and fasces, symbols of imperial pastime, that thou be not idle; undoubted a woman dominion and consular power, have long since been cannot get her living by spinning on a distaff, yet it swept away; but the distaff and spindle, emblems of stoppeth a gap, and yarn must needs be had.' But, domestic peace and household cares, still remain. through the more rapid production of yarn by the Their history, if it could be written, would be the wheel, enabling a few to spin for many, spinning history of the human race: the same aims and aspira- became a means of obtaining a livelihood, the higher tions, wants and wishes, hopes and fears, have been classes had less necessity to practise it, and, conseexperienced by millions of the various nations, tribes, quently, the time-honoured appellation of spinster religions, colours, and tongues, who have used these sank considerably in the social scale. That title, simple implements. which in the primitive period of the distaff and spindle had been given to royal princesses, after the invention of the wheel, became legally applicable only to unmarried females under the rank of viscount's daughters. A somewhat similar change has been caused in our own time by the invention of the machine, and consequent extinction of the spinning-wheel. In Sir Richard Steele's Spinster, published in 1719, the daughters of wealthy farmers are among the spinners of linen and woollen, who petition against the use of the 'tawdry, pie-spotted, flabby, ragged, low-priced thing called calico; a foreigner by birth; made the Lord knows where, by a parcel of heathens and pagans that worship the devil, and work for a halfpenny a day.' Randle Holme, writing about the same time, describes three kinds of wheels then in use: the country, or farmer's wheel; the city, or gentlewoman's wheel; and the girdle wheel, which, being carried at the girdle, could be used when walking about. This last, Randle says, was a little wheel with gigam-bobs, pleasing to ladies that love not to overtoil themselves.' Indeed, down to the present century, the wheel was sedulously plied by ladies of slender income. There are men alive now, riding in their carriages, who were indebted for their first start in life to their mother's wheel. Many a college expense has it aided to defray, many an Indian outfit has it helped to purchase. But the wheel, emblem of variations and mutabilities,' as Among our Saxon ancestors, the terms spear-half and spindle-half expressed the male and female lines of descent; and in their tombs, we find a spear beside the skeleton of a man, a spindle with the remains of a woman. In Germany, even at the present day, the jurisprudents divide families into male and female by the titles of swerdt-magen and spindel-magen—in other words, sword-members and spindle-members. Among the ancient Franks, when a free woman formed an attachment to a slave, she was summoned before the elders of the tribe, who, in open council, offered her the choice of a sword or a spindle. If she accepted the former, she not only retained the freedom, which was her birthright, but also acquired supremacy over the serf with whose fortunes she had connected herself; on the contrary, if she chose the spindle, she reduced herself to the level of her lover. The French law, by which 'No woman shall succeed in Salic land,' has been expressed in popular phraseology by the words, le royaume de France ne tombe point en quenouille-the kingdom of France never falls under the distaff. The well known fleur de lis is said to have been adopted as the regal cognizance of France, in allusion to the Salic code, and with reference to the passage of Scripture respecting the lilies of the field-they toil not, neither do they spin.' Fluellen says, is subject to the very changes it so aptly symbolises. It is persons of much lower standing in the social scale who now wait in the halls of the giant Steam, to tend the whirling bobbins of the manyspindled mule and jenny. The quantity of yarn produced by a good spinner from the wheel in a certain time depended principally upon its fineness. From The Twa Dogs, we learn that a hank or twelve cuts was considered a fair day's work: A country lassie at her wheel, Her dizzen done, she 's unco weel. But the spinners of Tyrone, who had the reputation of being the best in Ireland, thought two dozen no extraordinary task; and at their kemps, or contests of skill in spinning, they frequently produced as many as four dozen in one day. The native Irish-we use the term in contradistinction to the descendants of Scotch and English settlers-had songs specially composed and appropriated for singing at the wheel. Three of those 'spinning-wheel songs' are preserved in Bunting's Ancient Music; and the keen or funeral-cry of young Ryan, translated from Irish by the late Mr Croker, commences thus: Maidens, sing no more in gladness The able authoress of A Woman's Thoughts about Women, in a late number (184) of this Journal, speaking of the needle, says it is a wonderful brightener and consoler; our weapon of defence against slothfulness, weariness, and sad thoughts; our thrifty helper in poverty; our pleasant friend at all times.' In the medieval period, when men were women's tailors, the needle was little used by females, but the spindle and distaff, being their constant companions, afforded the same benefits and consolations to the sisterhood as the needle does now. Curiously enough, an old proverbial Latin verse, of the kind termed Leonine, actually alludes to this fact, though in other respects unjust to the sex: Fallere, flere, nere, dedit Deus in muliere ; One of the most curious of the early printed books, that are embellished with wood-cuts, is well known to connoisseurs as The Shepherd's Calendar. A chapter of this rare work is entitled, 'Of an Assault against a Snail.' The accompanying wood-cut represents a fortified palace. Upon one of the most accessible towers there is a snail, with head protruded and horns elevated, evidently in an attitude of defence. soldiers, fully equipped, and a woman, armed only with a distaff, form the assaulting-party against the snail-defended tower. In the letter-press, the snail defies his opponents, telling them that his strength and valour are fully commensurate with his terrific appearance, and concludes his braggadocio thus: If that these armed men approach me near, Two But they dare not for fear of me alone. The snail has a correct opinion of his antagonists' courage. The soldiers, like the ancient Pistol, use brave words,' but that is all. Commencing their speech with the words, 'Horrible snail!' they threaten to eat him with pepper and salt, but end with the impotent conclusion of merely requesting their horned enemy to abandon the tower: Get thee hence, by our advice, Out of this place of so rich edifice, And let us have this tower that we come till. The woman, however, exhibits more pluck than her male companions, soldiers though they be. Brandishing her distaff, she exclaims : Go out of this place, thou right ugly beast, That it shall sound into the realm of Spain. This assault against a snail' has been a grievous puzzle to antiquaries. Mr Offor, in England, asks: What does it all mean?' M. Nisard, in France, says that it is an insoluble enigma. The following nurseryrhyme, however, which we quote for the gratification which Chaucer thus translates in his prologue to the of the curious, seems to sufficiently explain, at least to Wife of Bath's Tale: Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath give To women kindly, while they may live. Besides being the universal, and we may say natural symbols of the softer sex, and their unfailing source of profit and pastime, the spindle and distaff were also their legitimate offensive and defensive weapons. In the south of Europe, the keen-pointed steel spindle has often served as a stiletto; while in the north, the large distaff could readily be used as a club. We'll thwack him hence with distaves,' says Hermione in The Winter's Tale; again, in Beaumont and Fletcher's King and no King, a paltry fellow is spoken of as one 'so below a beating that the women find him not worthy of their distaves.' Goneril, in King Lear, alluding to the 'cowish terror' of her helpmate, says: "I must change arms at home, and give the distaff into my husband's hands.' The wife of the immortal host of the Tabard, also, when she found her husband unwilling to resent her fancied injuries, exclaims: our own satisfaction, the mysterious affair: The best man amongst them durst not touch her tail; Nor has the rock, the modern representative of the distaff, been found less useful as an offensive weapon than its predecessor. An episode in domestic life, known in Scottish song as the Weary Pound of Tow, is much too natural to be wholly unfounded on fact: I bought my wife a stone of lint, Quoth I: For shame, thou idle dame! She took the rock, and with a knock, She broke it o'er my pow. When a French peasant wishes to designate the golden age of his country, the good old times as we often absurdly enough phrase it, he says it was in the days when Queen Bertha spun-au temps que la reine Bertha filait. This is generally understood to refer to a certain, or rather very uncertain, longfooted, or, according to some authorities, goose-footed Bertha, who figures in romantic legend as the mother of Charlemagne. But, allowing for difference of language, the same saying (nel tempo ove Berta filava), with exactly the same signification, is current in Italy. Who, then, was Bertha? A clue to her real character is found in The Gospels of Distaves (Les Evangiles des Quenouilles), one of those extraordinary old French works known as joyousetes, and which mingle Christianity with paganism, piety with obscenity, and sound sense with the absurdest superstition. One of the preachers, in this remarkable production, is a Dame Bertha of the Horn, who can be readily identified with the spinning Queen Bertha of French romance, on the one hand, and with a Frau Berta of German superstition, on the other. This Frau Berta, sometimes termed Fricke, still holds a conspicuous position in the folk-lore of Northern Germany. She visits the farmhouses and peasants' cottages during the twelve nights immediately succeeding Christmas. She inspects the condition of the spinning-wheels, and is particularly pleased to find all the flax spun off from the rocks. The maidens who are tidy and industrious spinners, she rewards with all kinds of good-luck; while she showers misfortunes on the lazy and the sluttish. And we have had her here, even in England, but in the character of a saint. Of the many miracles ascribed to St Bertha, we need only mention one. A convent founded by her was deficient of water, but, by merely drawing her distaff along the ground, she formed a noble aqueduct, copiously supplied with the pure liquid, for the use of the establishment. Her festival, termed St Distaff's Day, was kept on the morning after Twelfth-day, and Herrick thus alludes to it: Partly work and partly play, more ancient In short, Queen Bertha of the long-foot, and Dame Bertha of the Horn, Berta the fairy, and Bertha the saint, are all derived from one source, being the modern representatives of a much patroness of spinners, the Herthus or Frija of the Scandinavian mythology. It has been truly said that the religion of one era becomes the superstitions of the next. The three well-known stars in Orion's belt, which Scottish peasants term 'the ell-wand,' were known to the ancient Northmen as Frija's Distaff; but since the introduction of Christianity among them, those stars have been termed Mary's Rock. The ramifications of popular superstitions are widely spread. One of the Roman rural laws forbade a woman to spin on the highway, it being considered an inauspicious omen to the travellers who might meet her so employed. Nearly two thousand years later, the very same notion was common in France. In the Gospels of Distaves, we read that it is exceedingly unlucky for a man travelling on horseback to pass a woman spinning; he should either put off his journey, or avoid her by turning back and going another way. In the Isle of Man, and also in Northern Germany, it was considered sinful to spin on Saturday; and the peasantry still relate a story of two old women, indefatigable spinners, who would spin on that day. At last one of them died; and while the survivor was spinning on the following Saturday, the deceased appeared to her, and holding out a dreadfully burned hand, said: 'Behold what I have justly won, In the Scottish cottage and farmhouse, the wheel was always carefully put away at an early hour of the Saturday afternoon; not from any superstitious feeling, but out of respect for the approaching day of rest. There was, however, a curious feeling connected with the reel in Scotland, no later than in the times of the grandmothers of many now living. The reel, registering the amount of yarn wound upon it, was looked upon as an approach to a magical contrivance, and with a conscientious feeling of avoiding the slightest tampering with forbidden arts, numbers of Scottish matrons never used the 'winnle blades,' but measured their yarn by winding it over the left hand and elbow, repeating a certain formula to aid the memory in retaining the reckoning. The useful agricultural implement for winnowing corn, termed a fan, was long unused in Scotland for a similar reason. As another illustration of this feeling, we are induced to copy the following paragraph in full from the Scots Magazine of 1756. Without giving the whole, we would despair of affording the reader a correct idea of the curious affair: 'Peter Pairny, servant to Mr Thomas Muir, minister of the Seceding congregation at Orwell, who worked his wheel-plough, was lately accused before the session of using pranks something like enchantments, pretending to stop or render unfit for service a wheel-plough, by touching the beam with a rod, and bidding the plough stop till he should lose (loose) it. The session agreed to declare him under scandal, to debar him from sealing ordinances till the offence be purged; and to ordain him to appear and be publicly rebuked; at the same time leaving room for further inquiry into the matter, and for inflicting what further censure may be judged necessary. This sentence was intimated from his pulpit by Mr Muir on Sunday, September 12th, and the man appeared and was rebuked.' If Pairny had lived a hundred years earlier, in all probability he would have been burned; if a hundred years later, he might have been honoured and fêted as a benefactor of his race. But we are wandering from the thread of our discourse, and the length of our yarn warns us to cut it short, and reel up, without more than alluding to the numerous songs, anecdotes, proverbs, and homely tales connected with hand-spinning, an art, in most places, completely passed out of recollection; for the spinning-wheel, after superseding the distaff and spindle, was in its turn deposed by wheel of the turnspit dog, the pillion, and the packmachinery worked by steam. Like the black-jack, the saddle, the spinning-wheel is now almost unknown, times be found on the upper back-shelf of a museum save as a relic of the past. As such, it may someor collection of antiquities. And when we take into consideration that a steam-engine will whirl 150,000 spindles at once, rattling off 30,000 miles of yarn in an hour, at an expense of less than a halfpenny for every six miles-that the thousands of women tending steam-spinning machines earn more in one day than they could have earned in a week by hand-spinning— we may, in spite of all the pleasing associations and tented to leave it on the shelf: its work is done-our recollections of the spinning-wheel, be very well conyarn is spun. OÇEOLA: A ROMANCE. CHAPTER LXXII.-THE CONDITION OF BLACK JAKE. WE had escaped from the block-house in boats, down the river to its mouth, and by sea to St Marks. Thence the volunteers scattered to their homes-their term of service having expired. They went as they listed; journeying alone, or in straggling squads of three and four together. One of these groups consisted of old Hickman the hunter, a companion of like kidney, myself, and my ever-faithful henchman. Jake was no longer the 'Black Jake' of yore. A sad change had come over his external aspect. His cheek-bones stood prominently out, while the cheeks themselves had fallen in; his eyeballs had retreated far within their sockets, and the neglected wool stood out over his temples in a thick frizzled shock. His skin had lost its fine ebon polish, and shewed |