This happened notably on the last occasion of our visit, when Crook, getting the two balls into a corner immediately hovering over the pocket, made eleven cannons in the space of a minute, without pocketing one, being a portion of a break of one hundred and sixteen, played with the most consummate tact and skill. Else, the game proceeds in silence, nothing being heard but the monotonous cry of the marker noting its progress.

In the summer, the classical concerts and the sable minstrels go on just the same, supplemented by the fancy fairs, the public meetings, the flower shows, and the other exhibitions, so that our Hall is the constant centre of attraction. So it ought to be, for it was a costly experiment, costing forty-three thousand pounds to build and furnish. Its architect was Mr. Owen Jones, whose special powers of internal decoration were never more effectively displayed, and it was opened on March the 25th, 1858, in the presence of the late Prince Consort. Long may it prosper!

TWO RUSSIAN JESTERS.

JOKES, like bills, require names to back them; and it will be found that, in every nation, some one personage, real or mythical, is selected as the lay-figure upon which all popular jests are by common consent displayed. The English have their Joe Miller, the Germans their Schiltbürger and their Tyll Eulenspiegel, the Americans their Colonel Crockett, the Orientals their Nasireddin el Khejah; and, in the same way, the chosen godfathers of Russian humour are Balâkireff, the jester, and Marshal Suvôroff. The latter name has long since passed into history; but the former requires some introduction to nonRussian readers. Popular traditions unite in representing Balâkireff as the constant attendant of Peter the Great, who figures largely in all the stories attached to the name of his buffoon. Many of these stories are probably the fabrication of a later age; but a fair proportion of them bear marks of authenticity, and, as fair specimens of national humour, are worth quoting.

On one occasion Balâkireff begged permission of his imperial master to attach himself to the guard stationed at the palace, and Peter, for the sake of the joke, consented-warning him at the same time that any officer of the guard who happened to lose his sword, or to be absent from his post when summoned, was punished with

death. The newly-made officer promised to do his best; but the temptation of some good wine sent to his quarters that evening by the czar, "to moisten his commission,' proved too strong for him; and he partook so freely as to become completely "screwed." While he was sleeping off his debauch, Peter stole softly into the room, and carried off his sword. Balâkireff, missing it on awaking, and frightened out of his wits at the probable consequences, could devise no better remedy than to replace the weapon with his own professional sword of lath, the hilt and trappings of which were exactly similar to those of the guardsmen. Thus equipped, he appeared on parade the next morning, confident in the assurance of remaining undetected, if not forced to draw his weapon. But Peter, who had doubtless foreseen this contingency, instantly began storming at one of the men for his untidy appearance, and at length faced round upon Balâkireff with the stern order, "Captain Balâkireff, draw your sword and cut that sloven down!"

The poor jester, thus brought fairly to bay, laid his hand on his hilt as if to obey, but at the same time exclaimed fervently, "Merciful Heaven! let my sword be turned into wood!"

And drawing the weapon, he exhibited in very deed a harmless lath. Even the presence of the emperor was powerless to check the roar of laughter which followed; and Balâkireff was allowed to escape.

The jester's ingenuity occasionally served him in extricating others from trouble as well as himself. A cousin of his, having fallen under the displeasure of the czar, was about to be executed; and Balakireff presented himself at court to petition for a reprieve. Peter, seeing him enter, and at once divining his errand, shouted to him, It's no use your coming here; I swear that I will not grant what you are going to ask!"

Quick as thought, Balâkireff dropped on his knees, and exclaimed, "Peter Alexeievitch, I beseech you put that scamp of a cousin of mine to death!" Peter, thus caught in his own tramp, had no choice but to laugh, and send a pardon to the offender.

During one of the czar's Livonian campaigns, a thick fog greatly obstructed the movements of the army. At length a pale watery gleam began to show itself through the mist, and two of the Russian officers fell to disputing whether this were the sun or not. Balâkireff, happening to pass by at that moment, they appealed to him to

"How should I know?" answered the jester; "I've never been here before !"

At the end of the same campaign several of the officers were relating their exploits, when Balâkireff stepped in among them. "I've got a story to tell, too," cried he, boastfully; "a better one than any of yours!"

"Let us hear it, then," answered the officers; and Balâkireff began.

"I never liked this way of fighting, all in a crowd together, which they have now-a-days; it seems to me more manly for each to stand by himself; and therefore I always went out alone. Now it chanced that one day, while reconnoitring close to the enemy's outposts, I suddenly espied a Swedish soldier lying on the ground just in front of me! There was not a moment to lose; he might start up and give the alarm. I drew my sword, rushed upon him, and at one blow cut off his right foot!" "You fool!" cried one of the listeners, you should rather have cut off his head!" "So I would," answered Balâkireff, with a grin, "but somebody else had done that already!"

At times Balâkireff pushed his waggeries too far, and gave serious offence to his formidable patron. On one of these occasions the enraged emperor summarily banished him from the court, bidding him never appear on Russian soil again." The jester disappeared accordingly; but a week had hardly elapsed when Peter, standing at his window, espied his disgraced favourite coolly driving a cart past the very gates of the palace. Foreseeing some new jest, he hastened down, and asked with pretended roughness, "How dare you disobey me, when I forbade you to show yourself on Russian ground?"

"I havn't disobeyed you," answered Balâkireff, coolly; "I'm not on Russian ground now!"

"Not on Russian ground?"

'No; this cart-load of earth that I'm sitting on is Swedish soil. I dug it up in Finland only the other day!"

Peter, who had doubtless begun already to regret the loss of his jester, laughed at the evasion, and restored him to favour. Some Russian writers embellished this story (a German version of which figures in the adventures of Tyll Eulenspiegel) with the addition that Peter, on hearing the excuse, answered, "If Finland be Swedish soil now, it shall be Russian before long"-a threat which he was not slow to fulfil.

The stories told of Marshal Suvôroff are of a different order, and display, better than whole pages of description, the wonderful way in which he contrived to adapt himself to the rude spirits with whom he had to deal, without losing one jot of his authority. What Napoleon was to the French army, Suvôroff was to that of Russia; now jesting with a soldier, and now rebuking a general; one day sharing a ration of black bread beside a bivouac fire, and the next speaking as an equal to princes and potentates. In fact, the two great sponsors of Russian wit form a most picturesque contrast. Balâkireff has very much the character of a spaniel in a lion's cage-admiring, even, while mocking his formidable patron-behaving towards him with a half-waggish, half-affectionate familiarity-perpetually offending, and perpetually forgiven. Suvôroff comes before us as an uncrowned king, one whose authority needed no outward symbol; an autocrat of Nature's making, full of a rough, hearty familiarity, that was in no danger of breeding contempt, and surrounded by men who enjoyed the bonhomie, while they dreaded the displeasure of the little, pug-nosed, grimy man, who was in their eyes the incarnation of earthly power and grandeur.

It must be owned, however, that in his own peculiar vein of pleasantry, the old marshal more than once met with his match. One of his favourite jokes was to confuse a man by asking him unexpectedly, "How many stars are there in the sky ?"

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On one occasion he put this question to one of his sentries, on a bitter January night, such as only Russia can produce. The soldier, not a whit disturbed, answered coolly, "Wait a little, and I'll tell you;" and he deliberately began to count, One, two, three," &c. In this way he went gravely on to a hundred, at which point Suvôroff, who was already half frozen, thought it high time to ride off, not, however, without inquiring the name of this ready reckoner. The next day the latter found himself promoted, and the story (which Suvôroff told with great glee to his staff) speedily made its way through the whole army.

On another occasion one of his generals of division sent him a sergeant with despatches, at the same time recommending The marthe bearer to Suvôroff's notice. shal, as usual, proceeded to test him by a series of whimsical questions; but the catechumen was equal to the occasion. "How far is it to the moon ?" asked Suvôroff.

Supposing you were blockaded, and had no provisions left, how would you supply yourself?”

"From the enemy !"'*

"How many fish are there in the sea ?" "As many as have not been caught.' And so the examination went on, till Suvôroff, finding his new acquaintance armed at all points, at length asked him as a final poser, "What is the difference between your colonel and myself?"

"The difference is this," replied the soldier, coolly; "my colonel cannot make me a captain, but your excellency has only to say the word!"

Suvôroff, struck by his shrewdness, kept his eye upon the man, and in no long time after actually gave him the specified promotion.

Suvôroff always affected the utmost brevity both in speaking and writing, the terseness of his despatches being almost unrivalled. The correspondence with Prince Potemkin, relative to the assault of Ismail, is unique in military history. Potemkin, copying the brevity of his general, wrote to him thus: "Marshal, you will take Ismail within three days, at whatever cost. -POTEMKIN." The day after the letter arrived Suvôroff carried the town by storm, with a loss of fifteen thousand men to himself, and thirty-eight thousand to the enemy-summing up the fearful tragedy in one doggrel couplet, which, literally translated, runs as follows:

"Praise to God, and praise to thee! Ismail's ta'en, and there I be." The anecdotes of the great marshal's eccentricities-his habit of wandering about the camp in disguise, his whim of giving the signal for assault by crowing like a cock, his astounding endurance of heat and cold, his savage disregard of personal comfort and neatness-are beyond calculation; but perhaps the most characteristic of all is his appearance in 1799 at the Austrian court, then one of the most brilliant in Europe. On being shown to the room prepared for him (a splendid apartment, filled with costly mirrors and rich furniture), this modern Diogenes said simply, "Turn out all that rubbish, and shake me Napoleon is said to have given the same answer to his examiners at Brienne.

"And do

you never sleep, then ?" asked the petrified questioner.

"Sometimes, when I've nothing better to do," replied Suvôroff, carelessly; “and when I want to have a very luxurious nap, I take off one of my spurs.'

The thunder-struck Austrian bowed and retired, doubtless considerably enlightened in his ideas of a Russian general.

It is worth while to chronicle (however out of place it may appear in a collection of jests) one more story of Suvôroff, that which tells how the grim veteran, already far on the road to the bloodiest of his campaigns, rode back for miles through the blinding storm to take one last look at his sleeping children, kissed and blessed them with passionate earnestness, and then rushed away like a whirlwind upon his mission of destruction. Such a man deserved more merciful judgment than the stinging epitaph written upon him by a wit of the nation which wrought his downfall: "A good soldier, but a bad general; a good servant, but a bad courtier; a good Russian, but a bad European."

LELGARDE'S INHERITANCE.

IN TWELVE CHAPTERS. CHAPTER XI.

So our visit to Hollyfield parsonage was a failure, and that which we paid, under Mr. Benson's auspices, to Mrs. Hatterick, at the farm, was not more successful. Though Mrs. Hatterick, a disagreeablelooking, hard woman, became courtesy itself when first she gathered from our inquiries that the boy she had slighted was somebody after all, she could give us no information; and probably a moment's reflection showed her that her treatment of him had not been of a nature which would enable her to establish any claim

upon him, for she froze up again into stolid indifference, would not remember the names of any of the gentlemen lodgers to whom Mr. Benson had referred, would not make any suggestions, would not be helpful or pleasant. Her husband had died a few months before, and we found no one able to help us. So, weary and dispirited, Lelgarde confessed that there was nothing for it but to return the way we came. Never did any one mourn over losing an inheritance as she did over being compelled to keep one. Her distress was a marvel and an amusement, not only to Mr. Seymour Kennedy, whose visits, however, became few and far between, but to Mr. Graves, the family lawyer, who just at this time left London, and established himself in a little whitewashed house in the outskirts of the village of Trembleton, giving up all business, except the management of the estate, which he did not like to relinquish after so many years. By his advice, Lelgarde remained passive for the present, keeping the whole matter secret; but it was too manifest that all the zest of life had deserted her; and how gladly would I have seen the heir appear, to have my Lelgarde her old selt in looks and cheerfulness, as well as in fortune. Since the mystery had been cleared up, her midnight terrors had ceased, but she lived, I was sure, in constant dread of their recurrence, for at the bottom of her heart, or rather of her fancy, there still lurked a belief that she had really received a spiritual visitation, instead of being, as I feel certain she was, merely the subject of a curious trick of memory. She avoided the room which we were wont to call Miss Hilda's; she shrank from all mention of her or her story, and once, when we passed the open door, and saw the unfinished picture, she burst into sudden tears.

"I have done my best, God knows I have!" she cried, in an agony of distress, and I could only soothe and pet her till her sobs subsided, and she was calm enough to listen to my oft-repeated arguments that what was not her fault could in no wise be imputed to her. Still I did not wonder at her depression; her position was a most painful one, and I understood the sigh with which she said:

"I shall never marry."

"You must marry somebody so rich that he will not mind giving up Athelstanes,' ," I said, trying to speak lightly; but she coloured rosy red, and answered gravely:

"No, I do not think that is at all likely to happen."

Soon after, she told me that she felt strongly her own helpless position as a woman; that though Mr. Graves professed to be making inquiries, she did not think he put any heart into it, and she knew he would rejoice if the missing heir never made his appearance.

"If I were a man," she said, "I would never rest. I would wander the world over till I found him."

In spite of Lelgarde's discontent, Mr. Graves had really done his best; he had, for months-for by this time summer was merging into autumn-advertised in the Times, and various other papers, inviting Henry Hamilton to apply to him at his office at Trembleton, and offering a reward to any one who could give well-substantiated news of him-but no one had as yet appeared.

One lovely afternoon in September I had tempted Lelgarde out for a walk. She had grown so listless now, that it was not easy to stir her up to take exercise, but on this occasion she led the way to the knoll whence we had so fine a view of the little domain. There we sat silent, and I grieved to see that slow tears began to trickle down her face as she gazed, and I noticed more than ever how pale that face was growing, and how thin the hands that were clasped upon her knee. The sight overcame all my self-control.

"My darling, my darling," I cried out. suddenly, "this is killing you."

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"Yes," she answered, quite quietly, and then, I suppose, the despair in my face struck her, for she put her hand in mine, and said:

"Never mind, Joany, dear; perhaps all will come right. When night is drearest, morn is nearest,' you know."

There was a hasty tread, a rustling in the bushes. We were near the public road, and there was nothing unusual in footpassengers coming that way, but nevertheless Lelgarde started violently, and sprang up. The wayfarer stopped short. I had one instant's view of a tall, broad-chested figure in light-coloured garments, knapsack on shoulder, and a bronzed and bearded face, before Lelgarde's glad cry and my own eyes told me who it was-Harry Goldie older, browner, broader-man instead of boy, but Harry Goldie still; goodhumoured, gay, and pleasant to look upon, as in the olden time. I could have blessed him for the brilliant happiness which shone at once on my Lelgarde's face, and I gave a hearty hand-shake in answer to his eager grip.

'Nay, how do you come here ?" returned my sister; it is our part of the country. I hoped you were come to pay us your promised visit."

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Indeed, I had no idea that I was in your neighbourhood. I am making a sketching tour, and yesterday I found a sudden call of business would bring me here to Trembleton- so I have been walking across country; and rather pretty country it is. Whose is that fine old place ?"

I am sure Lelgarde was going to say, "It is mine," but she changed her form of speech, and said, "It is Athelstanes."

"Indeed! It is very picturesque," said Harry, and he suddenly froze up into a company tone and manner, which, I could see, pained and surprised my sister. I could see, too, that there was a perplexity in her mind. Mr. Graves had made her solemnly promise not to reveal the state of things to any living soul without his permission, and her wish to welcome her old friend hospitably was warring with her great repugnance to take upon herself the position of mistress of Athelstanes. Hospitality, however, carried the day, and she begged him to stop and rest a little while with us, but the consciousness of an arrière-pensée made her manner so stiff, that I was not surprised to hear Harry decline almost as stiffly. A wise woman would have left things to settle themselves, but I am not wise, I suppose, and I could not stand the fading of pleasure on my Lelgarde's sweet face, so I put in a word to press him to come home with us for half an hour, and he consented after a few moments' demur. Through the plantations we went, treading out sweet smells from the damp grass, and through the gardens, to the house; and, as every step revealed more and more the grandeur of Lelgarde's kingdom, I saw poor Harry Goldie grow graver and more constrained. By an accident which, on looking back upon it, struck me as a strange one, some trifle had gone wrong with the drawingroom chimney, and the evening fire, which was beginning to be needful, had been lighted in Miss Hilda's room. The butler met us with this information, and Lelgarde could not show her reluctance to entering the room before him and our guest; indeed, I think, it was forgotten in the gladness of this new event. We sat down and talked; but it was all made talk, not

talk that flowed naturally, as in the days gone by. Harry was awkward and depressed, and though, in answer to our questions, he told of his successes in his career, it was with a sigh, as if they were not worth much to him; while Lelgarde soon grew serious too, and shrank from every mention of Athelstanes and of our life there, as if it stung her; and yet I felt sure that now, for the first time, she was regretting the probable loss of her property. In every pause, and they were many, I saw Harry's eye turning to the unfinished picture, which might well excite his curiosity, and I dreaded each moment that he would

refer to it. He did at last.

"That is a beautiful face," he said; "why has that picture never been finished?" Lelgarde winced visibly, and she began: "It was in the house when I cameand then stopped short.

"It must be by a good artist." "No, I believe not; at least it is not by a celebrated one.'

"That may be, but he was a good artist for all that," said Harry, and then he pulled up short at Lelgarde's languid answer.

"Very possibly;" which certainly sounded as if she wished to snub down his remarks. Soon after he sprang up, as if he were eager to be gone, and yet felt it a wrench to go.

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Good-bye," he said; "it has been a great pleasure to see you again; to see you in your kingdom." And he smiled a little. I saw

Lelgarde held out her hand. that she could scarcely keep from tears. Harry took the hand, and burst out as if he could not help it:

"I shall carry away a picture of you here in your grand old house. I am right glad to have seen you so bright and happy."

"Happy ?" broke from Lelgarde, suddenly. "Oh! Harry, never judge from outside things. I am not one bit happyif you only knew—”

'My dear, remember your promise," I interposed. Why was Harry Goldie, of all people, to be honoured with her confidence?

She checked herself at once, and said, with her little air of dignity, "Yes, I have not forgotten it. Harry, I cannot invite you to come here again; you will know why some day; but I hope we shall meet sometimes. Are you going to stay long at Trembleton ?"

"I really don't know; I fancy not," said Harry, with bewildered looks; "but Miss Atheling, you must let me ask, could I,