tunes on his fiddle, and every now and then would stop and
laugh, exclaiming, as if gazing at something, "Ha, ha! you old fellow
there, nailed up to the wall, with your fiddle; you can't play--you are
the wrong one--here he sits!"

On one occasion the spirit of the old man burst out again: it was the
day when the gayly-decked fir bush was stuck upon the finished gable of
the new schoolhouse.[R] The carpenters and masons came, dressed in their
Sunday clothes, preceded by a band of music, to fetch "the master." The
old fiddler, Hans, was the whole day long in high spirits--brisk and gay
as in his best years. He sang, drank, and played till late into the
night, and in the morning he was found, with his fiddle-bow in his hand,
dead in his bed....

Many of the villagers fancy, in the stillness of the night, when the
clock strikes twelve, that they hear a sound in the schoolhouse, like
the sweetest tones of a fiddle. Some say that it is old Hans's
instrument, which he bequeathed to the schoolhouse, and which plays by
itself. Others declare that the tones which Hans played _into_ the wood
and stones, when the house was building, come _out_ of them again in the
night. Be this as it may, the children are taught all the new rational
methods of instruction, in a building which is still haunted by the
ghost of the last fiddler.

* * * * *

GEORGE III. gave Lord Eldon a seal, containing a figure of Religion
looking up to Heaven, and of Justice with no bandage over her eyes, his
Majesty remarking at the same time, that Justice should be bold enough
to look the world in the face. The motto of the seal was _His dirige te.
Quere._ Would not this be a more appropriate inscription for the spout
of a tea-pot than for the seal of a Lord Chancellor.

FOOTNOTES:

[R] This custom is prettily related in Auerbach's story of 'Ivo.'

From Dickens' Household Words.

A BIOGRAPHY OF A BAD SHILLING.

I believe I may state with confidence that my parents were respectable,
notwithstanding that one belonged to the law--being the zinc door-plate
of a solicitor. The other was a pewter flagon residing at a very
excellent hotel, and moving in distinguished society; for it assisted
almost daily at convivial parties in the Temple. It fell a victim at
last to a person belonging to the lower orders, who seized it, one fine
morning, while hanging upon some railings to dry, and conveyed it to a
Jew, who--I blush t