''Hold! Reymes,' said I, as he was picking up a pebble. 'How do
you know but the poor fellow with the large family may not
undertake to repair the windows by contract, at so much a year or
month?'

''Eh! egad, I never thought of that,' said the whimsical,
good-hearted creature. 'I'll suspend operations until I've made
the inquiry, and if I've wronged him I'll make amends.'

Mr. COWELL is a plain-spoken man, and seldom spares age or sex in his
exposure of the secrets of the stage, and the appliances and means to boot
which are sometimes adopted by theatrical men and women to make an old
face or form 'look maist as weel's the new.' The celebrated Mrs. JORDAN,
in performing with him, was always very averse to his playing near the
foot-lights, greatly preferring to act between the second entrances. The
'moving why' is thus explained:

'The fact is, she was getting old; dimples turn to crinkles after
long use; beside, she wore a wig glued on; and in the heat of
acting--for she was always in earnest--I have seen some of the
tenacious compound with which it was secured trickle down a
wrinkle behind her ear; her person, too, was extremely round and
large, though still retaining something of the outline of its
former grace:

'And after all, 't would puzzle to say where
It would not spoil a charm to pare.'

There is no calamity in the catalogue of ills 'that flesh is heir
to' so horrible as the approach of old age to an actor. Juvenile
tragedy, light comedy, and walking gentleman with little
pot-bellies, and _have-been_ pretty women, are really to be
pitied. Fancy a lady, who has had quires of sonnets made to her
eye-brow, being obliged, at last, to black it, play at the back of
the stage at night, sit with her back to the window in a shady
part of the green-room in the morning, and keep on her bonnet
unless she can afford a very natural wig.'

Sad enough! sad enough! certainly, and as true as it is melancholy. But
let us get on board the Yankee vessel which brings Mr. COWELL to America,
and at _his_ 'present writing' is lying off Gravesend. The difficulty he
experienced in getting up a conversation with his fellow-passengers is a
grievance still loudly complained of by his travelling countrymen:

'It was a dark, drizzly, melancholy night; a fair specimen of
Gravesend weather and the parts adjacent; no 'star tha