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emergency, he orders College (a phrase by which he is accustomed to indicate bitter), and then with reckless hospitality invites the eight nearest men to wine after Hall, shortly afterwards readily accepting an invitation to play billiards till Chapel. He ends by ordering old Stilton andno cream, and, with an equal contempt for both his engagements, makes the best of his way to the Union. His next appearance is at Chapel. His conduct there is marked by no very characteristic peculiarities, except that he is absorbed in deeper depths of contemplation than ever, as a result of which he occasionally finds an anthem-book in his pocket a day or two afterwards. By what process it arrived there he always declares himself unable to conceive.

On his way from Chapel he registers a vow to read for the rest of the evening. Infatuated man! If he had made no such resolve, the chances are, that his unconscious feet would have carried him to his own rooms, and his object would have been attained. But, elated by his virtuous determination, he conceives it his duty to call on a friend just to announce his resolve, and to prepare himself for the effort by a few minutes' conversation. Need I detail the consequences? At ten o'clock he finds that he has had the conversation which was to prepare him for his work, but has not done the work for which the conversation was to prepare him. But the day is not yet lost. He wanders disconsolately to his own rooms, with a vague idea that he ought to go to bed. But luckily a problem-paper is lying on his table, and thatto the unmathematical mind-surprising phenomenon, an interesting problem, attracts his attention. He sits down, and two o'clock finds him still at work. But he grows sleepy, and lighting a candle, he seizes a pen and proceeds to write: "Call me at half-past —.' At this stage of the proceeding he falls into a reverie and his arm-chair, and is found at seven the next morning pen in hand, with the unfinished document before him. But let me not leave the reader under the impression that he has been asleep. I am assured on the combined testimony of his gyp and his bed-maker that his eyes are wide open; and he has himself told me, in confidence, that he was only thinking of that fifth problem, which would not come out as neatly as he liked.

My task approaches a termination.

We have traced his brief career, his flaming track across our heaven, and, like the burning arrow in Virgil, which

"Signavit viam flammis tenuesque recessit
...in ventos,"

VOL. V.

or, like the meteors, which in the words of the same poet

"Cælo sæpe refixa,

Transcurrunt crinemque volantia sidera ducunt,"

so does the subject of our sketch vanish from our gaze, while we

"Attonitis hæremus animis,"

and can only exclaim

"Unde quo venit ?"

What was his origin, and what the closing scenes of his life? Who has seen him in his early infancy? Who has followed him to his grave? An absent baby is a phenomenon which my eyes at least have never witnessed. Let us try for a moment to conjecture what that prodigy of nature would be like. Does it first see the light in those stagnant country towns where the clock seems to have stopped at noon on the nineteenth of November, 1766, and not yet to have been set going? where the farmers have their coats cut in a fashion which has immortalized the tailor of our respected progenitor Noah, and where the man who once travelled four miles by rail, is at once the admiration and the horror of the whole community? Imagination fails me; I leave the problem to be solved by the wider spirit of research, and by the fuller light of future ages.

Of the absent man's career after his disappearance from our sight, I hazard a bolder conjecture. He is hesitating in his choice of a profession, when he is suddenly offered a lucrative appointment in New Zealand. Charmed with the prospect, he rushes up to London, having first despatched his luggage by an earlier train to Liverpool, and finding a packet just sailing, engages a berth, and does not remember until he is fairly in the middle of the Atlantic that he neglected to enquire the vessel's destination, which he then discovers to be-Jamaica. On his arrival there, he finds the island in a state of revolt, and to avoid being massacred by the negroes, disguises himself as one of them, and succeeds only too well. Some days afterwards he falls into the hands of the British troops, and is ignominiously shot by the orders of his most intimate College friend, who is in command of the detachment. He dies as he has lived, true to his reputation and his principles. May our last end not be like his!

SS.

SORROW AND JOY.

(See p. 140.)

WHAT is sorrow but a cloud,
Hiding from us for a while,
As our heads with grief are bowed,
Joy's perennial sunny smile:
Soon the cloud shall fade away,
Leaving nought but radiant day.

Sorrow like the gloom around

Some high mountain's dreary sides,
Veils the summit glory-crowned,
Where the brightness aye abides.
Upwards ever! thou shalt know
Short the reign of care and woe.

Now the light is cold and dull,
Struggling down thro' sorrow's night;
Soon it shall be warm and full,
Bursting through in glorious might.
Lasts a day the reign of sorrow,
Joy has all the eternal morrow.

L.

REMINISCENCES OF OUR TOWN.

A MURDER WITHOUT A Motive.

MANY years ago, when people were not so wise as they are now, in a word, when I was a young man, wore tight boots, thought a good deal about my figure, and wrote sonnets in young ladies' albums, it was my lot to reside for most of the year in a quiet country town in one of the midland counties. The railroad had not come there then; the grandest man in the place was the straight-backed baldheaded squire, very near him ranked the broad-shouldered. port-loving rector, and no one would for a moment have thought of awarding the third place to any less imposing dignitary than the parish clerk, a sleek and pompous personage who gave the tone to the politics and religion of his most orthodox fellow-townsmen, never knocked under to any one except the rector and squire, and to them only under protest as being the representatives of church and state. Everybody in the town voted for the conservative candidate in case of a contested election, everybody went to bed at ten o'clock, and the only gaiety countenanced in the place was an occasional tea-party, at which young ladies of staid demeanour attired in white muslin, met stiff-jointed young gentlemen encased in black cloth, and solemnly conversed on the weather. Altogether it was one of those charmingly primitive abodes of rural felicity that the march of intellect is doing its best to sweep from the face of the earth by the help of railroads and radical trade unions. Such a place, if any such still exist, would by the present fast age be voted "the slowest hole in Christendom," and its inhabitants would be stigmatised as "a set of humdrum old bores," but at the time of which I write we managed to live there contentedly enough and let the world wag as it would. The squire was not ashamed to live on his own estate and manage his farm himself, the rector preached two sermons a week, and the clerk held up

his head and said 'Amen' in church, and settled the affairs of the nation in the parlour of the public-house afterwards, and who were we that we should wish for change when we saw our betters so well content with themselves and all the world? So we bowed to the squire, slept through the sermons, and listened to the clerk, like good churchmen and honest Tories

as we were.

My chief ally in those days was Barney, the rector's gardener and general factotum, who also filled the arduous posts of sexton and town crier to the universal satisfaction of the whole community. Barney was a genuine son of Erin, descended as he used to say from the "ould ancient stock of Brian Boroo who wor kings of all Ireland before the flood, aye, an' afther that too for a matther of three or it might be four thousand years." Poor Barney! his royal descent did not help him much, but his unfailing good humour and original eccentricity made him an invaluable companion, and many long afternoons used I to spend watching Barney prepare a last narrow tenement for the reception of such of our neighbours as at last left the home of their childhood for the unknown land, in obedience to the summons which even they, stubborn old Tories as they were, could not withstand. I often think now that to the casual observer we must have appeared a strange pair; the light-hearted boy with all his life and his trials to come, and the white-haired wrinkled old man, who in a short time must himself inherit one of those narrow houses he is now preparing for another. To see us two there among the grey stones and grass grown mounds that told of so many generations already past away and lying now forgotten and uncared for, must have awakened strange thoughts in the mind of the looker on. But I never saw it in that light then, and was quite content to stand and listen to Barney's countless stories on every imaginable subject, with every now and then a strange feeling of childish awe as he threw up with a spadeful of earth some discoloured bone or other crumbling relic of the long forgotten dead.

One bright afternoon, in July, I was watching Barney preparing a grave for old Miles, an ancient peasant, who after living to a fabulous age and being repeatedly alluded to in the local newspapers as "the oldest inhabitant,”—that mysterious individual within whose memory such "terrific hail storms," "prodigious gooseberries," and "devastating floods" never before occurred," had now at length ended his days in peace and the almshouse. After working for

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