ons; which last phenomena he considers
as signs of the times. He has always some dismal tale of the kind to
deal out to his customers, with their doses; and thus at the same time
puts both soul and body into an uproar. He is a great believer in omens
and predictions; and has the prophecies of Robert Nixon and Mother
Shipton by heart. No man can make so much out of an eclipse, or even
an unusually dark day; and he shook the tail of the last comet over the
heads of his customers and disciples until they were nearly frightened
out of their wits. He has lately got hold of a popular legend or
prophecy, on which he has been unusually eloquent. There has been a
saying current among the ancient sibyls, who treasure up these things,
that when the grasshopper on the top of the Exchange shook hands with
the dragon on the top of Bow Church Steeple, fearful events would take
place. This strange conjunction, it seems, has as strangely come to
pass. The same architect has been engaged lately on the repairs of the
cupola of the Exchange, and the steeple of Bow church; and, fearful to
relate, the dragon and the grasshopper actually lie, cheek by jole, in
the yard of his workshop.

"Others," as Mr. Skryme is accustomed to say, "may go star-gazing, and
look for conjunctions in the heavens, but here is a conjunction on the
earth, near at home, and under our own eyes, which surpasses all
the signs and calculations of astrologers." Since these portentous
weathercocks have thus laid their heads together, wonderful events had
already occurred. The good old king, notwithstanding that he had lived
eighty-two years, had all at once given up the ghost; another king had
mounted the throne; a royal duke had died suddenly,--another, in France,
had been murdered; there had been radical meetings in all parts of the
kingdom; the bloody scenes at Manchester; the great plot of Cato Street;
and above all, the queen had returned to England! All these sinister
events are recounted by Mr. Skryme, with a mysterious look, and a dismal
shake of the head; and being taken with his drugs, and associated in the
minds of his auditors with stuffed sea-monsters, bottled serpents, and
his own visage, which is a title-page of tribulation, they have spread
great gloom through the minds of the people of Little Britain. They
shake their heads whenever they go by Bow Church, and observe, that they
never expected any good to come of taking down that steeple, which in
old time