outh! With prim lips mine hostess kisses the glass, previously
letting fall a not inelegant curtsy--for she had, we now learned, been a
lady's maid in her youth to one who is indeed a lady, all the time her
lover was abroad in the army, in Egypt, Ireland, and the West Indies,
and Malta, and Guernsey, Sicily, Portugal, Holland, and, we think she
said, Corfu. One of the children has been sent to the field, where her
husband is sowing barley, to tell him that there is fear lest dinner
cool; and the mistress now draws herself up in pride of his noble
appearance, as the stately Highlander salutes us with the respectful but
bold air of one who has seen some service at home and abroad. Never knew
we a man make other than a good bow, who had partaken freely in a charge
of bayonets.

Shenstone's lines about always meeting the warmest welcome in an inn,
are very natural and tender--as most of his compositions are, when he
was at all in earnest. For our own part, we cannot complain of ever
meeting any other welcome than a warm one, go where we may; for we are
not obtrusive, and where we are not either liked, or loved, or esteemed,
or admired (that last is a strong word, yet we all have our admirers),
we are exceeding chary of the light of our countenance. But at an inn,
the only kind of welcome that is indispensable, is a civil one. When
that is not forthcoming, we shake the dust, or the dirt, off our feet,
and pursue our journey, well assured that a few milestones will bring us
to a humaner roof. Incivility and surliness have occasionally given us
opportunities of beholding rare celestial phenomena--meteors--falling
and shooting stars--the Aurora Borealis, in her shifting
splendours--haloes round the moon, variously bright as the
rainbow--electrical arches forming themselves on the sky in a manner so
wondrously beautiful, that we should be sorry to hear them accounted for
by philosophers--one-half of the horizon blue, and without a cloud, and
the other driving tempestuously like the sea-foam, with waves
mountain-high--and divinest show of all for a solitary night-wandering
man, who has anything of a soul at all, far and wide, and high up into
the gracious heavens, Planets and Stars all burning as if their urns
were newly fed with light, not twinkling as they do in a dewy or a
vapoury night, although then, too, are the softened or veiled luminaries
beautiful--but large, full, and free over the whole firmament--a galaxy
of shining