to take due pains--would inevitably become a
clever writer. As it is, her notes and 'jeux d'esprit'
struck off 'a trait de plume,' have great point and
neatness. Take the following billet, which formed the label
to a closed basket, containing the ponderous present alluded
to, last Michaelmas day:--

'To Miss M.
"When this you see
Remember me,"
Was long a phrase in use;
And so I send
To you, dear friend,
My proxy, "What?"--A goose!'

Dogs, when they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes ways as
odd as those of the unfurred, unfeathered animals, who walk on two
legs, and talk, and are called rational. My beautiful white greyhound,
Mayflower,* for instance, is as whimsical as the finest lady in the
land. Amongst her other fancies, she has taken a violent affection for
a most hideous stray dog, who made his appearance here about six months
ago, and contrived to pick up a living in the village, one can hardly
tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachael Strong, the
laundress--a dog-lover by profession; now winning a meal from the
lightfooted and open-hearted lasses at the Rose; now standing on his
hind-legs, to extort by sheer beggary a scanty morsel from some pair of
'drouthy cronies,' or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper
on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure
contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on
his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of
ugliness; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker's pigs;
now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of Master Brown
the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog; now filching the skim-milk of Dame
Wheeler's cat:--spit at by the cat; worried by the mastiff; chased by
the pigs; screamed at by the dame; stormed at by the shoemaker; flogged
by the shopkeeper; teased by all the children, and scouted by all the
animals of the parish;--but yet living through his griefs, and bearing
them patiently, 'for sufferance is the badge of all his tribe;'--and
even seeming to find, in an occasional full meal, or a gleam of
sunshine, or a wisp of dry straw on which to repose his sorry carcase,
some comfort in his disconsolate condition.

*Dead, alas, since this was written.

In this plight was he found by May, the most high-blooded and
aristocratic of greyhounds; and from this plight did May re