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and objurgating the inoffensive beast, who is waiting to get a word in himself. "Madame" he will say, "I am sorry for your position, but a fat little infant will put Mrs. Lion in a good temper, will you join us? If not I wish you good morning." The children of to-day with their artistic scrap books, and elaborately illustrated volumes, would turn with juvenile contempt from the art of 1822, but your grandparents had nothing better my dears, so you must pity, but not laugh at them and their simple pictures.

Humble repository of human hopes and affections now dead and lost to us who have not crossed the narrow stream, let me cherish thee as a sacred treasure, and as I close the modest album, repeating the words which are on its front page and serve as a preface :

"Albums are coffers where light thought

Is treasured and amassed;

Records of moments else forget,

Embalments of the past."

I wonder whether the wish came true to either Hermia or Helena.

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What has happened? My quiet room is full of sounds of loud laughter and talking, and the gas has gone out, there is only a great light from a fire under a huge chimney, and there is a big beam running across the ceiling from which hang hams, and sides of bacon, and strings of onions, and a great bunch of mistletoe. My lilies and my sunflowers, and recherché dado have disappeared-not a single peacock's feather is left. Round my fireplace-and yet not mine-is grouped a merry party. Good gracious! what a terrible hubbub they are making; so great that they drown entirely the howling of the wind and the dashing of the waves upon the shore outside, which is only apparent when the door of this farmhouse kitchen is opened to admit another guest. It is Christmas Eve, and all that is taking place is in Farmer Broderip's house by the sea; and surely those two young ladies, who are asking some question of a fine young sailor who is standing leaning over their chairs, are Hermia and Helena, the owners of the beautiful new album they have before them. Two bonnie lasses, with honest rosy cheeks like their Shakespearian namesakes

"Two lovely berries moulded on one stem,
So, with two seeming bodies but one heart."

It is a happy, pleasant scene-the good cheer, the festive decorations, the jolly host, the merry party, all unæsthetic as they are, the laughing sailor cousins, the blushing girls; and as we gaze we wish their future career may be devoid of hours of gloom, and that their "sunny moments" may be many-for many years to come.

The room is very dark, neither gas nor ruddy firelight, but only a little oil lamp lights up the scene. The homely farm kitchen with its solid comforts, its merry guests, has disappeared, and there is no sound. as of the waves upon the shore outside. A miserable apartment, indeed a mere garret, with sloping roof and whitewashed walls and dormer window. We seem to have left the seaside and are at the top of an old house in a great city. The meagre furniture, the dilapidated room, the tiny fire, all speak of poverty if not of want itself. I think it must be Christmas time for a few poor sprigs of holly are placed about the room as though for old acquaintance sake. At the table are seated two elderly women and before them is an open book which I know at once to be my album, for there is no mistaking that placid lion and that frantic mother in the picture. I last saw that book under happier circumstances -at the old farm house. Can these faded, wan faced women be the same Hermia and Helena Broderip? Yes! The fates have been unkind to them, and the bright hours too few since those days when both were young together, when perhaps they worked-

"Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

Both warbling of one song, both in one key."

Fortune and parents have fled, friends are no more, but still the two old maids have clung together; toiling hard for scanty food and raiment, alone in the world, yet not altogether alone, for they have each other, and can converse tenderly of what has been, and what might have been, if the prayers and wishes inscribed in the time-worn album could only have been fulfilled. No visitors climb those steep stairs to wish them a friendly Christmas greeting; no benevolent strangers deposit large hampers of good things at their door; no long lost uncle comes from the Indies with pockets full of money-as I believe they do in story books generally to take them to a happy home; no kind fairy waves her wand and transforms the poor garret into a brilliant palace of delight; no, none of these things happen very often in real life. No visitors did I say? Why the room is full of them, shadowy forms flit to and fro, father, mother, brothers and sisters, dear friends are there although the old maids cannot see their faces, for their attention is riveted on the precious volume before them. And as they softly turn each page they smile and now they weep, and the tears seem to fall faster than the leaves which strewed the brooks of Vallombrosa long ago.

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It has grown darker still, for now only a candle-flickering in its socket-just makes the darkness of the chamber visible; there is no fire, and the room is icy cold. The same poor garret, and upon the table a sprig of holly-for it is merry jovial Christmas once more-and there is still the same old album open upon the table; only no sound but the sighing of the wind outside disturbs the solemn stillness of the place. A woman, aged and feeble, sits at the table-it is Hermia-alone now, for Helena is taken from her, and has joined the shadows and forms which linger still in spirit around the solitary old maid. As she turns

the pages of her treasured book, cold, and hunger, and loneliness are forgotten; she even smiles faintly now and then, but at the picture of the sailor lad, who was "doom'd upon the main to toil," the tears run fast upon her furrowed cheek; she bows her weary head upon the page, and moves no more—and I think the old maid is alone no longer-for she is dead.

And so they sold the poor woman's scraps of furniture, and amongst them the old album, and to the thoughtless cruel world only an old maid had passed away; and so nobody cried because she was gone, no mourner followed her body to the grave. Yet the angels who carried the spirit up from the earth rejoiced, for they knew that Hermia and Helena were united, and happy for ever and evermore.

How dazzling the light seems now; I think I must have been dreaming, for around me are the sunflowers and the peacock's feathers— I am at home again. I don't think I'll read that silly old album any more, it gives one such sad ideas. But strange to say, the album has vanished and never could be found again; it was a most mysterious disappearance certainly; but perhaps there never was an old album with silly pictures and verses in it, nor two old maids, named Hermia and Helena. Who can say? Meanwhile let us amuse ourselves, for it is the merry and jolly Christmas time, when everybody is, or should be, laughing all day long, and forgetting all unpleasant things as though they were not.

W. H. T.

RESIGNATION.

Once, long ago, I loved a maid
For none my heart beat warmer;
And yet she called me fickle, false,
And left me; cruel charmer!

Since then, to 'scape the like mishap
And after due reflection

I love all pretty girls I see
With the self-same affection.

J. K.

MY FIRST SCHOOLMASTER.

I HAD arrived at the mature age of nine when I was let loose from my mother's apron-strings and transferred to the guardianship and tender mercies of Mr. Robert Snoocher, Organist and Schoolmaster, of Blankupon-Stour.

It must not be supposed, however, that my education had been entirely neglected until I became a pupil of this illustrious pedagogue at his "Select Academy for Young Gentlemen." So far from this being the case I had been "very much schooled," indeed previously by sundry feminine representatives of the scholastic profession; for although fifty years have passed away since my education began, my memory is still so retentive as to various little incidents which befell me during my infancy, such as swallowing pins and buttons inadvertently, eating slate pencil, and drinking ink; that I can, without much difficulty, fix the period when I was first taken to school, or “carried over the crossings” by my nurse, as somewhere between my third and fourth birthdays.

Fifty years form a long retrospect; and it is only when attempting to chronicle some of the incidents of childhood and youth, as I have undertaken to do in this brief biography, that one can realise to the fullest extent the changes which have taken place during the last half-century; not merely throughout the world at large, but in one's own immediate neighbourhood. Then-cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and prize-fighting, to which might be added witnessing the wholesale public execution of criminals, were the popular amusements. Then there were no postage stamps, no envelopes, no penny daily newspapers, no lucifer matches. Photography and lighting by gas were in their infancy; and the possibilities of the present full development of the Railway system were even more deeply hidden in the womb of time than is the science of electriclighting in the present day.

No

Locally there was no mayor, no corporation; no council-house. ward meetings; no municipal fights! Think of this, ye unpleasantly jubilant liberals and ye sat-upon conservatives. Was life worth

living? Or do ye look back with regret to the good (?) old times described by our own poet Freeth some fifty years before, when he says:

Ye wrangling old cits, let me beg you'd look down,
And copy from Birmingham's peaceable town,
Where souls forty thousand or more you may view!
No justice of peace, and but constables two.

Let cities and boroughs for contest prepare,
In chusing of Sheriffs, Recorder, or Mayor;
With such kind of titles they've nothing to do,
Nor discord in chusing of officers shew.

The envy and hatred elections bring on,

Their hearty intention is always to shun;

No polling, no scratching, nor scrutinies rise,

Who friendship esteem must such measures dispise.

Then there were no public parks or baths, save Pudding Brook, and the ever memorable Vaughton's Hole. No Midland Institute, no Board Schools, and, alas! but few Statues, and no Memorial Fountains whatever.

At the time when my boarding-school experience began the stage coach was a flourishing institution; and there are few sights more pleasantly impressed upon my memory than the turn-out of a smart fourin-hand from the Nelson Hotel on a bright May morning on its twelve hours journey to London; and few sounds that I know of more exhilarating than the Hit-ho-tantivy of the guard's bugle.

The coaches to London via Banbury and Oxford passed the very door of Mr. Snoocher's "Academy" every day, but he never availed himself of their services to convey his pupils to school. Having an eye to effect and economy, especially economy, he always engaged a chaise-and-pair for the occasion, subsequently charging the parents about double the ordinary coach fare. I recollect, as if it were but a few years ago, how jolly I thought it was to go to school, like Mrs. Gilpin went unto the Bell at Edmonton, all in a "chaise-and-pair;" that is to say, I thought so when we started; but as the said chaise though originally constructed to hold four persons was made to accommodate eight boys, we were compelled to stand during the whole of the journey. By the time we stopped to bait at Stratford-on-Avon it was quite dark and very cold, although only about the middle of July. Some of the big boys of sixteen or seventeen, who seemed then in my eyes to be grown-up men, availed themselves of this opportunity to descend from the chaise and spend a portion of their pocket-money in cigars, and in an evil moment I was tempted to follow their example. When I say that this was my first cigar, all previous experiments in smoking having been confined to small pieces of cane, the reader will readily imagine the dénouement. We were so closely packed standing up, and the night was so dark, that the changing hues of my complexion, and the various stages of my indisposition were

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