post-office. These having been
sufficiently gazed at, and beginning to lose their attractiveness
except for the flies, and, truly, the boys also, (in whom I find it
impossible to repress, even during school-hours, certain oral and
telegraphic correspondences concerning the expected show,) upon some
fine morning the band enters in a gaily-painted waggon, or triumphal
chariot, and with noisy advertisement, by means of brass, wood, and
sheepskin, makes the circuit of our startled village-streets. Then, as
the exciting sounds draw nearer and nearer, do I desiderate those eyes
of Aristarchus, "whose looks were as a breeching to a boy." Then do I
perceive, with vain regret of wasted opportunities, the advantage of a
pancratic or pantechnic education, since he is most reverenced by my
little subjects who can throw the cleanest summerset, or walk most
securely upon the revolving cask. The story of the Pied Piper becomes
for the first time credible to me, (albeit confirmed by the Hameliners
dating their legal instruments from the period of his exit,) as I behold
how those strains, without pretence of magical potency, bewitch the
pupillary legs, nor leave to the pedagogic an entire self-control. For
these reasons, lest my kingly prerogative should suffer diminution, I
prorogue my restless commons, whom I also follow into the street,
chiefly lest some mischief may chance befall them. After the manner of
such a band, I send forward the following notices of domestic
manufacture, to make brazen proclamation, not unconscious of the
advantage which will accrue, if our little craft, _cymbula sutilis_,
shall seem to leave port with a clipping breeze, and to carry, in
nautical phrase, a bone in her mouth. Nevertheless, I have chosen, as
being more equitable, to prepare some also sufficiently objurgatory,
that readers of every taste may find a dish to their palate. I have
modelled them upon actually existing specimens, preserved in my own
cabinet of natural curiosities. One, in particular, I had copied with
tolerable exactness from a notice of one of my own discourses, which,
from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to
have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I
recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity.
Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman
preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in
a neighbouring