ely sensible, but she possessed dim traces of past beauty.
I can say nothing more of her, but that it was the fugitive wife whom I
had borne to Brighton so many years ago. No words of mine could paint
the living warning that I beheld. What had been the sorrows of unmerited
desertion and unkindness supported by conscious rectitude, compared with
the degraded guilt, the hopeless anguish, that I then saw?

I regret to say, I was last month nigh committing manslaughter; I broke
down in the Strand and dislocated the shoulder of a rich old maid.
I cannot help thinking that she deserved the visitation, for, as she
stepped into me in Oxford Street, she exclaimed, loud enough to be heard
by all neighbouring pedestrians, "Dear me! how dirty! I never was in
a hackney conveyance before!"--though I well remembered having been
favoured with her company very often. A medical gentleman happened to be
passing at the moment of our fall; it was my old medical master. He set
the shoulder, and so skilfully did he manage his patient, that he is
about to be married to the rich invalid, who will shoulder him into
prosperity at last.

I last night was the bearer of a real party of pleasure to Astley's:--a
bride and bridegroom, with the mother of the bride. It was the widow of
the old rector, whose thin daughter (by the by she is fattening fast)
has had the luck to marry the only son of a merchant well to do in the
world.

The voice suddenly ceased!--I awoke--the door was opened, the steps let
down--I paid the coachman double the amount of his fare, and in future,
whenever I stand in need of a jarvey, I shall certainly make a point of
calling for number One Hundred.

* * * * *

THE GATHERER

"A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles."
SHAKSPEARE.

* * * * *

BELL.--THE CRY OF THE DEER SO CALLED.

I am glad of an opportunity to describe the cry of the deer by another
name than _braying_, although the latter has been sanctioned by the use
of the Scottish metrical translation of the Psalms. Bell seems to be an
abbreviation of the word _bellow_. This sylvan sound conveyed great
delight to our ancestors chiefly, I suppose, from association. A gentle
knight in the reign of Henry VIII., Sir Thomas Wortley, built Wantley
Lodge, Warncliffe Forest, for the purpose, as the ancient inscription
testifies, of "Listening to the Harts' Bell."

C.K.W.

* * *