am over the wilderness. As we
whitened towards the village in the light of morning, the earlier
labourers held up their hands in wonder what and who we might be; and
Fro, who had missed his master, and was lying awake for him on the
mount, came bounding along, nor could refrain the bark of delighted
passion as his nose nuzzled in the soft down of the bosom of the
creature whom he remembered to have sometimes seen floating too far off
in the lake, or far above our reach cleaving the firmament.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.

FYTTE THIRD.

O Muckle-mou'd Meg! and can it be that thou art numbered among forgotten
things--unexistences!

"Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees!"

What would we not now give for a sight--a kiss--of thy dear lips! Lips
which we remember once to have put to our own, even when thy beloved
barrel was double-loaded! Now we sigh to think on what then made us
shudder! Oh! that thy butt were but now resting on our shoulder! Alas!
for ever discharged! Burst and rent asunder, art thou now lying buried
in a peat-moss? Did some vulgar villain of a village Vulcan convert
thee, name and nature, into nails? Some dark-visaged Douglas of a
henroost-robbing Egyptian, solder thee into a pan? Oh! that our passion
could dig down unto thee in the bowels of the earth--and with loud
lamenting elegies, and louder hymns of gratulation, restore thee,
buttless, lockless, vizyless, burst, rent, torn, and twisted though thou
be'st, to the light of day, and of the world-rejoicing Sun! Then would
we adorn thee with evergreen wreaths of the laurel and the ivy--and hang
thee up, in memory and in monument of all the bright, dim, still, stormy
days of our boyhood--when gloom itself was glory--and when--But

"Be hush'd my dark spirit! for wisdom condemns,
When the faint and the feeble deplore."

Cassandra--Corinna--Sappho--Lucretia--Cleopatra--Tighe--De Stael--in
their beauty or in their genius, are, with millions on millions of the
fair-faced or bright-souled, nothing but dust and ashes; and as they
are, so shall Baillie, and Grant, and Hemans, and Landon be--and why
vainly yearn "with love and longings infinite," to save from doom of
perishable nature--of all created things, but one alone--Muckle-mou'd
Meg!

After a storm comes a calm; and we hasten to give the sporting world the
concluding account of our education. In the moorland parish--God bless
it--