Then all together, when the signal came,
Discharged their a b-abs against the dame,
Who, 'mid the volleyed learning, firm and calm,
Patted the furloughed ferule on her palm;
And, to our wonder, could detect at once
Who flashed the pan, and who was downright dunce.
There young devotion learned to climb with ease
The gnarly limbs of Scripture family trees;
And he was most commended and admired
Who soonest to the topmost twig perspired.
Each name was called as many various ways,
As pleased the reader's ears on different days;
So that the weather, or the ferule's stings,
Colds in the head, or fifty other things,
Transformed the helpless Hebrew thrice a week
To guttural Pequot or resounding Greek;
The vibrant accent skipping here and there
Just as it pleased invention or despair.
No controversial Hebraist was the dame-

With or without the "points" pleased her the same.
If any tyro found a name too tough,

And looked at her, pride furnished skill enough;
She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing,
And cleared the five-barred syllables at a spring.
Ah, dear old times! there once it was my hap,
Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap;
From books degraded, there I sat at ease,
A drone, the envy of compulsory bees.

THE NAIL IN THE SHUTTER.

(A TEARFUL TALE.)

ANONYMOUS.

CHAPTER I.

AUGUSTUS FIZKIN adored Jemima, the lovely and accomplished daughter of the wealthy Alderman Foozle. The lovely and accomplished daughter of the city

magnate was not indifferent to the attentions of Augustus Fizkin.

But the thingumbob of what's-his-name, as the immortal some-one-or-other has remarked, never does what-you-may-call-it smoothly. Fate, to quote the language of the author of Genial Gush, flung with a changeable glance coming days of immutable variety into the teeth of Fizkin's understanding.

The carpenter who made the shutters for the distinguished emporium, where Larkins retailed coal and potatoes to a too incredulous world, was in the employment of Adverse Destiny; although ostensibly a journeyman, working for John Tomkins, carpenter and undertaker (N.B.-Funerals performed. Pleasure vans for excursions. All orders promptly attended to). Snogett, the destined, did not hit the right nail on the head, chiefly on account of circumstances over which he had no control. But it would have been surprising if he had been able to exercise control over anything after a gallon of porter, four quarterns of Old Tom, three brandies and water hot, half a bottle of publican's port, a tasting order for the docks, and a suck at the monkey. Such was the light repast with which Snogett had prepared himself for the Herculean task of driving the eventful nail on which the fate of Fizkin, not to say nations, hung in a tremor of imperturbable anxiety.

To be brief, Snogett, in a state of blissful, beatific, and otherwise alcoholic ecstasy, to which the sensations of the chosen candidate for the representation of Oxford University would be a fool, failed in his attempt to hit the last nail in the shutter of John Tomkins on the head. And in failing to hit the head, he missed the point, a fact which will not surprise the learned, since in the simple language of science, the relation of the head to the point in question, is equal to twice the periphery, and the difference between the squares of the two sides subtending the right angle, and the rectangle, formed by the two parts, together with about twenty times the square of the angle which divides them and

the left hand corner of Burton Crescent. No! W.C.

Q. E. D.

At any rate, that nail was left sticking out, and as Augustus Fizkin hastened by to fetch from Covent Garden the early asparagus of balmy spring to lay at the feet of his adored

C-c-c-c-c-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!

He sat down

By which algebraical symbol, I am directed by Mr. Babbage and Professor de Morgan, to represent the rapid and illusory disintegration of the manufactured fibre of the ovis domestica, or baa-lamb of commerce. What was Augustus Fizkin to do? He could not visit the object of his joy with a tear! on the step of Gordon's Hotel, in Covent Garden, and wept. Concealing a curse in a tear, he dropt it with a loud report on the mat. A passing philosopher, on whose Jovian brow wisdom and a black felt hat sat enthroned, stopped to inquire the cause.

"Go avay, you fool, and get a tailor to sew you up!" said the sage, with an onion and a foreign accent. "Sew him up!" exclaimed another passer-by,

go and see the operation."

"I'll

But finding it was only a sartorial one, the disappointed gentleman disappeared amid a brilliant display of fireworks.

CHAPTER LXI.

Mr. Alderman Foozle's carriage was winding its glittering but tedious way toward Covent Garden. Its occupants were Mrs. Foozle (whom the most casual observation of the springs would have shown the spectator to be seated on the left hand side of the vehicle), Miss Foozle (in a blue bonnet, with pink strings, and no crown, a purple silk dress, bronze boots, and beautiful back hair, specially imported from foreign parts), Miss Anastasia Foozle, Master Mulligatawney Marmaduke Foozle, and the poodle.

The

The main thoroughfare was up and doing! carriage had to make a detour through obscure streets.

They were passing a tailor's shop, when Miss Foozle gave a start and a shriek, and stared fixedly out of the window, regardless of the fact that by so doing, she transformed the top of her beautiful nose into a little white disc.

There, in that shop, she beheld her Algernon, in his shirt-sleeves, sitting on the shop-board with eight others, similarly attired. It was too plain he was a tailor, or to make the statement intelligible to the meanest intellect that ever drivelled over an equation: A. F. = a man × 1.

With which affecting reduction of the whole statement to the lowest terms we close the chapter.

CHAPTER CIX.

He had gone in to have his coat mended,
There were not any chairs on the premises,
So he sat on the board for the workmen intended,
It appears an inscrutable Nemesis !

She thought him a tailor. In vain he denied!

She, that cruel suspicion would harbour.

He shot himself through the head with a box of Mor

rison's Pills. So he died!

But she didn't marry the barber.

CHAPTER IV.

(By Electric Telegraph from Knebworth.)

So is The

The Accidental and the Perplexing are Identical. The Snob and The Tailor are very much alike. Baronet. Oh! Heroes and Divinities of the Primal Age, when The Beautiful and The Bombastic wandered hand in hand through Arcadia, ye did not wear clothes, and therefore could not tear them. With you The Sartorial and The Misapprehended would not have seemed One. Poor Fizkin. Rich Foozle. The Rich and the Poor are not One. I prefer The Former.

ON Hounslow heath-and close beside the road,
As western travellers may oft have seen,-
A little house some years ago there stood,
A miniken abode;

And built like Mr. Birkbeck's, all of wood:
The walls of white, the window shutters green,-
Four wheels it hath at North, South, East, and West,
(Though now at rest)

On which it used to wander to and fro,
Because its master ne'er maintain'd a rider,

Like those who trade in Paternoster Row;
But made his business travel for itself,
Till he had made his pelf,

And then retired-if one may call it so,-
As a roadsider.

Perchance, the very race and constant riot
Of stages, long and short, which thereby ran,
Made him more relish the repose and quiet
Of his now sedentary caravan;

Perchance, he loved the ground because 'twas common
And so he might impale a strip of soil,
That furnish'd, by his toil,

Some dusty greens, for him and his old woman ;-
And five tall hollyhocks, in dingy flower,

Howbeit, the thoroughfare did no ways spoil
His peace, unless, in some unlucky hour,
A stray horse came, and gobbled up his bow'r.

But tired of always looking at the coaches,

The same to come,-when they had seen them one day!

And, used to brisker life, both man and wife

Began to suffer N U E's approaches,

And feel retirement like a long wet Sunday,