this little ball of mud of ours, tilting, galloping, trotting, shuffling away, as we best can, all mounted, and each one with some fancied business of importance to achieve ! Why cannot we rather perform the tasks allotted us? Why, like silly boys, play away the time, whilst we are at school?-for such this world undoubtedly is to us immortal spirits. We imagine the "school-master is abroad," and thousands of us are riding helter-skelter in search of him; when the fact is, that he lives in the depths of our own being, and if we will but stay at home and hear him, he will teach us all things worth knowing.

After so grave a commencement, surely I shall call down upon my head much heavy censure, when I say, that this story owes its rise, solely to the ridiculous appearance and manners of the hero of it: but my exposing his weakness to the world, cannot now affect him. He is gone where these imaginary horses, great and small, have " no local habitation or a name," and where the disencumbered and real man will not wish to mount them. He, that is, Mr. Morton Moncton, had a a whole stud of ragged, scrubby, ungroomed, mental Shetland-Ponies, that he rode alternately here below.

This is the fictitious name I shall give to the very odd gentleman, whose lady I attended some years ago at Notting Hill? for be it known to all present, that I always carefully throw a veil impenetrable, over the real ones of the parties I notice in these sketches. That they all have, or had real ones, is absolutely true-why should I draw from a layfigure, a thing inanimate, when there are, and have been so many living models sitting in all kinds of attitudes and expressions ready for my use? This gentleman, whom I have designated Mr. Morton Moncton, was a very grotesque one, and I think Madame Isis must have had a drop too much, when she designed him. His lady was a very common sort of personage; rather pretty, rather young, rather affected, and rather ignorant; I shall have but very little to say about her in this Tale, except that she made the most she could of her interesting situation whilst I was with her, and would not abate a single inch of that prerogative she deemed herself entitled to, in virtue of her matronly dignity, now for the first time assumed: Mercy on us! one would have thought from the airs Mrs. Morton Moncton gave herself, that she was the only one who had ever brought a man-child into the world, and that the whole race of Adam depended solely upon herself, for the perpetuation of its species. But "Othello's occupation's gone." She will, poor lady! enjoy such dignity no more.

Mr. Morton Moncton had been a most rejoicing bachelor until the age of fifty; never once I believe, up to that period, having contemplated to perpetrate marriage-he had other things to do; and as he thought, of much greater importance, for was not he a philosopher? a painter? a poet? and something of an astrologer to boot? Had he not a library, a laboratory, studio, and an observatory? Never would he have married at all, but from a fit of spleen against his old housekeeper, who had been his nurse, and having rather an infirm memory as well as person, forgot for three successive nights his strict injunction, and brought over her own aged head the infliction of a mistress for her negligence, or rather, I should say, her infirmity-but I must describe the gentleman.

Full six feet of length had nature allowed to Mr. Morton Moncton, and that of good measure, but as to breadth there she had most wickedly failed him; nearly cheated him altogether. So spare, so meagre was his form, that I often wondered as I saw him walk in his garden, why the sun did not shine through him! and where there could possibly be room in him for a heart, and lungs, and liver, and all the rest of the interior machinery of a human being, to do its work in! Scarcely could he be called a child of the flesh; and as for bone, a most niggardly allowance had he of that commodity. Can we, wonder then, that with all his genius, or, at least, his aspirations after it, Mr. Morton Moncton should be, and also complain of so being, during the long winter of most miserably cold.

Being a man of vast invention, Mr. Morton Moncton had constructed a most ingenious machine, made of tin, and carefully covered over with red baize, which held a full pail-full of boiling water, properly corked; and into this double-barrelled apparatus, he was in the habit every night of inserting his cold spare feet, ankles and legs, up to the very calves ;I beg his pardon, the legs were innocent of such absurdities; there was nothing of the calf about him, and that the reader will soon learn. He was, and acted like, a man of spirit.

Now poor Mrs. Young, his aforesaid housekeeper, who had, as I have mentioned, nursed him (lean as he was) when an infant, and watched his progress upwards but not outwards ever since, was the only female that had ever contributed to his comfort from the death of his own mother, a few months after his birth, until nearly the period I am speaking of, when he came within the sphere of my observation. To her, the aforesaid Mrs. Young, he appeared a paragon of manly perfection. His various pursuits she looked upon almost with adoration. She deemed him a very "proper man;" gloried in his height; thought not of his girth, and had she but remembered to have made the giddy young housemaid fill the huge tin machine with boiling water for her master's use, and place it carefully and comfortably, as she ought to have done, at the bottom of his bed, she might still perchance have presided at his house, had her easy chair and cushions by the side of the drawing-room fire as formerly, her spectacles and work-box on the polished table before her,instead of having the one wheeled down stairs into the housekeeper's room, and the others removed to a walnut-wood table, of insignificant size, in the same apartment. On small things hang the fate of mighty empires!

Cold as an ice-berg, looked and felt Mr. Morton Moncton, on getting up one frosty morning in December, not having had his two tin cylinders, containing the friendly warmth, when he retired to bed. Other gentlemen would have stormed and raved, on finding the deficiency, routed up the house, and insisted on having them got ready immediately. But this was not the method of Mr. Moncton; he brooded over his misfortune, his wrongs, in silence; gloomy, freezing silence! thought he was the most injured man alive; would scarcely take any breakfast; entered neither his library, laboratory, studio, nor observatory all day; but crossing his long, slim legs on the opposite side of the fireplace, at which the neat and smiling Mrs. Young reposed, perfectly unconscious of impending ill, and as loquacious as usual, he would not

utter a syllable, nor be soothed or talked into good humour; the old lady thought an illness was coming on by his odd manner, and advised her foster-son to bathe his feet at night in warm water; but this affectionate proposition seemed to him to be an insult added to an injury; for he now violently ejaculated with most unbecoming warmth—“ Dthe warm water, and you into the bargain."

'God bless my heart and soul!" exclaimed the alarmed housekeeper, looking at her master through her spectacles, "what can be the matter with him?" but before she could receive an answer, Mr. Morton Moncton had taken his tall, spare form, his spindle shanks and his long, exceedingly long nose, out of the apartment, and in another minute she heard the hall door slap to with great noise. The master of that handsome house at Notting Hill did not retnrn to it until the evening, or rather the night,-for it was ten o'clock when he entered, not the drawing room as usual, but ringing with much vehemence for candles to be brought to him in the library, retired to his sleeping apartments without deigning to speak a word to his old nurse, who had fretted herself pale and ill with anxiety, imagining all sorts of things, and as is usual, never once thinking of the right one.-She knew his temper well, and therefore, although she ventured not to approach him in his sanctuary, yet fondly hoped the cause of his present ill-humour, if such it was, would be blown away, or slept away by morning, when "Richard would be himself again. And so it might have been, had he found his feet-comforter properly prepared for his use the second night-but no! there it stood in a corner of his chamber, with its red jacket on, like a soldier in barracks, and bolt upright upon its two circular legs or hollow cylinders, as if it never was intended to do service any more-unattached, laid up on half-pay. All that night Mr. Morton Moncton walked up and down his sleeping apartments, like a demented being; Mrs. Young told me all this herself, with tears in her eyes. Oh! if he would but have spoken-would but have relieved his mind!" said she, pathetically, "Poor dear gentleman! I would have got up instantly and made that young minx of a housemaid heat the water in the middle of the night, and get ready the reservoir, had I known-had I but suspected what sat so heavily on his mind! But I had told the young hussey once, and after that-there is a fate in these things-never thought more about it-I ought to have seen to his comfort myself."

On the following morning Mrs. Young informed me, that her dear master looked most "awfully" indeed, and really unwell; he had not deigned to enter his bed, but had paced his room during the watches of the night, till his nose was blue, and his long limbs frozen. When she asked most kindly "If he felt unwell ?" he darted at her a most furious look, gulped down a cup of hot coffee, and again slammed to the halldoor." "He is bewitched," thought Mrs. Young, "He has gone so much lately to that Mr.Varley's, the Astrologer, that he will lose his senses; he has got some nonsense in his head, I dare say, about the stars, and perhaps believes his hour is come. Still," said the old woman to me, "I never once suspected that all this misery and anger could be about a frightful tin-case clothed in scarlet flannel, which he might have had heated twenty times a day, aye, and in the night too, for that matter, if he would but have mentioned it!"

A strange change had taken place in the mind of Mr. Morton Moncton, during the third night of his bereavement-for no hot cylinders had he. Mrs. Young assured me that he no longer in the morning looked resentful, though exceedingly blue and cold; there was an air of fixed determination about him, which puzzled her much; he made an excellent breakfast, even handed her the buttered toast, and seemed, as she said, and fondly thought, coming round;" only that now and then, he slapped his hand upon his bony nether limb, as if he meant to say "Yes, I am resolved! nothing shall turn me from my purpose."

After breakfast, Mr. Morton Moncton went into his dressing-room, and adorned himself with much care: his best black satin waistcoat, his last new coat, and terminations." He came into the drawing-room when he had finished, with a look of defiance, mixed with pity; and when she ventured to ask him, glancing on his dress, "If he dined out to-day?" he answered, with a husky voice, choked almost with emotion, "Yes, Mrs. Young, I do dine out, and probably shall to-morrow and every day this week. You will soon know more, if matters go on as I wish them."

She did know more; for it seems he went immediately and proposed for the daughter of his old friend Mr. Sutton, at Kensington gravelpits; and being a man of full three thousand a year, he was instantly accepted. Short work did he make of his courtship, for in less than ten days from the time he went out armed cap-a-pee in his black satin waistcoat, &c., he brought home, to the infinite dismay of poor Mrs. Young, the young lady I had then the honour of attending at Notting Hill, as Mrs. Morton Moncton, who instantly trundled the comfortable blue Morocco chair of the poor old housekeeper into her own apartments down stairs, and herself after it into the bargain.

What " we do in haste, we generally repent at leisure." Poor Mr. Morton Moncton, I believe, did so every moment of his life afterwards. Accustomed to be petted, flattered, beloved by his old respectable and sensible nurse, all his habits formed and his fancies anticipated (except, indeed, in the affair of the tin water-holder, and that was from inadvertence alone),—dreadful was his annoyance in having a pert, assuming, and common-place woman, breaking in at every corner upon his former occupations, and with claims upon his time and attentions that he could not gainsay. Mrs. Morton Moncton followed her tall, gaunt husband into all his sacred haunts: even the observatory, a little kind of lanthorn at the top of the house, surmounted by a weathercock, was not free from her loving, or rather vexatious, visits. She would take no hints, understand no suggestions,--" that, in her delicate state of health, she might injure herself by clambering up a frail ladder, not fit for a lady to mount." "No; she preferred that strange octagon room," she said, "to any other in the house, when he was in it: the air was so fresh and wholesome there too, at the top of the house, and she could see all over the country." If he in despair shifted his quarters to the laboratory, and told her, "he had an experiment to make of great nicety, that required much calculation, and might be attended with danger," then this most affectionate, or rather attached, spouse insisted on going thither to witness it, plaguing him with a thousand frivolous, ignorant questions, and

asking him the names of every article she saw. He could no longer read in quiet; for if he made his escape into the library, thither would she go, asking him to show her prints, or read to her from some foolish novel. It was the same thing in the studio: not a bust, or torso, or leg, or arm, was free from her inquisitive research. Heartily did he wish her back again at her father's house in Kensington gravel-pits, and himself at liberty to follow his own pursuits, without a namby-pamby woman always at his heels: but when Mrs. Moncton pronounced herself in a way to present him with a miniature resemblance of herself, Mrs. Young assured me that she thought her beloved master would have run "stark staring mad," as he seemed never once to have contemplated, in his bachelor simplicity, that such an event was probable. This brings me up to the period when I entered the family, to my great amusement; for never yet did I see such an assemblage of odd qualities in one individual as in Mr. Morton Moncton.

It was certainly some respite to this singular but kind-hearted gentleman, when his adhesive lady was confined to her own chamber, and he gave me repeated hints, which the shrewd old housekeeper interpreted to me in her own way, and rightly enough, I have no doubt, "that it would be advisable for me to lay a strict injunction on Mrs. Moncton, not to leave her apartment too soon, as he had heard" (I should like to know what judgment he, an old bachelor, could give upon such a matter)—" he had heard that often injury ensued by ladies too soon coming down stairs after"— and he left me to finish the sentence as I thought proper. Happy would he have been if I could have persuaded her to stay there for ever.

It was a most absurd thing to see this wild-looking, crane-necked, shadow sort of an old-bachelor-spoiled-man, when he was first shewn his infant heir. There seemed to be as much astonishment in him as Adam must have felt when he looked upon the first child that was ever born into the world. He stooped down over it, just touched its forehead with his finger, and seemed amazed that the poor little thing could move its hands and open its eyes. "I will cast its nativity myself," said Mr. Morton Moncton: "You are quite correct as to the precise moment it was born?" he demanded of me : I should like to have Mr. Varley here to assist me. Do you, Madam, know any thing of that extraordinary gentleman?" he asked me, forgetting, I believe, at that moment, that he had a wife and a son, and only longing to be at his own delightful pursuits again, one of which had been the study of the heavenly bodies, and attempting to learn by their movements what would be the destinies of those born under their peculiar influences.

"Thank heaven," he exclaimed, "this little breathing animal, for at present it is no better, was born, you tell me, at sun-rise! Good! Strength and vigour shall he have, at any rate. I entered this mortal

life, Madam, at midnight, when there was no moon, and not a single star visible. It is wonderful that I have got on so well as I have done. But I shall bring Mr. Varley home to dinner to-day, and you will much oblige me by letting him look at that queer little being you have there. Mrs. Moncton will not object, I am sure; and at night, when the stars are out, we will go up together into the observatory, and consult them still more distinctly respecting the fate of Master Pinkface there. Will he always look as healthy and rosy as he does now?"

N. S.-VOL. I.

00