be taken up for sheep-stealing presently ourselves. They have chased the poor little lamb into a ditch, and are mounting guard over it, standing at bay-"Ah wretches, I have you now! for shame, Saladin! Get away, Brindle! See how good May is. Off with you, brutes! For shame! For shame!" and brandishing a handkerchief, which could hardly be an efficient instrument of correction, I succeeded in driving away the two puppies, who after all meant nothing more than play, although it was somewhat rough, and rather too much in the style of the old fable of the boys and the frogs. May is gone after them, perhaps to scold them; for she has been as grave as a judge during the whole proceeding, keeping ostentatiously close to me, and taking no part whatever in the mischief. The poor little pretty lamb! here it lies on the bank quite motionless, frightened I believe to death, for certainly those villains never touched it. It does not stir. Does it breathe? Oh yes, it does! It is alive, safe enough. Look, it opens its eyes, and, finding the coast clear and its enemies far away, it springs up in a moment and gallops to its dam, who has stood bleating the whole time at a most respectful distance. Who would suspect a lamb of so much simple cunning? I really thought the pretty thing was dead-and now how glad the ewe is to recover her curling spotted little one! How fluttered they look! Well! this adventure has flurried me too; between fright and running, I warrant you, my heart beats as fast as the lamb's. how exquisitely beautiful! and it is not the primroses only, those gems of flowers, but the natural mosaic of which they form a part: that net-work of ground ivy, with its lilac blossoms and the subdued tint of its purplish leaves, those rich mosses, those enameled wild hyacinths, those spotted arums, and above all those wreaths of ivy linking all those flowers together with chains of leaves more beautiful than blossoms, whose white veins seem swelling amidst the deep green or splendid brown ;-it is the whole earth that is so beautiful. Never surely were primroses so richly set, and never did primroses better deserve such a setting. There they are of their own lovely yellow, the hue to which they have given a name, the exact tint of the butterfly that overhangs them (the first I have seen this year! can spring really be coming at last?)-sprinkled here and there with tufts of a reddish purple, and others of the purest white, as some accident of soil affects that strange and inscrutable operation of nature, the colouring of flowers. Oh how fragrant they are, and how pleasant it is to sit in this sheltered copse, listening to the fine creaking of the wind amongst the branches, the most unearthly of sounds, with this gay tapestry under our feet, and the wood-pigeons flitting from tree to tree, and mixing their deep note of love with the elemental music. Yes! spring is coming. Wood-pigeons, butterflies, and sweet flowers, all give token of the sweetest of the seasons. Spring is coming. The hazel stalks are swelling and putting forth their pale tassels; the satin palms with their honeyed odours, are out on the willow, and the last lingering winter berries are dropping from the hawthorn, and making way Ah! here is the shameless villain Saladin, the cause of the commotion, thrusting his slender nose into my hand to beg pardon and make up! "Oh wickedest of soldans! Most iniquitous pagan! Soul of a Turk!”—but there | for the bright and blossomy leaves. is no resisting the good-humoured creature's penitence. I must pat him. "There! there! Now we will go to the copse, I am sure we shall find no worse malefactors than ourselves -shall we, May ?-and the sooner we get out of sight of the sheep the better; for Brindle seems meditating another attack. Allons, messieurs, over this gate, across this meadow, and here is the copse." How boldly that superb ash-tree with its fine silver bark rises from the bank, and what a fine entrance it makes with the holly beside it, which also deserves to be called a tree! But here we are in the copse. Ah! only one half of the underwood was cut last year, and the other is at its full growth: hazel, briar, woodbine, bramble, forming one impenetrable thicket, and almost uniting with the lower branches of the elms, and oaks, and beeches, which rise at regular distances over-head. No foot can penetrate that dense and thorny entanglement; but there is a walk all round by the side of the wide sloping bank and copse carpeted with primroses, whose fresh and balmy odour impregnates the very air. Oh THE TOUCHY LADY. ONE of the most unhappy persons whom it has been my fortune to encounter, is a pretty woman of thirty, or thereabout, healthy, wealthy, and of good repute, with a fine house, a fine family, and an excellent husband. A solitary calamity renders all these blessings of no avail:- the gentlewoman is touchy. This affliction has given a colour to her whole life. Her biography has a certain martial dignity, like the history of a nation; she dates from battle to battle, and passes her days in an interminable civil war. The first person who, long before she could speak, had the misfortune to offend the young lady, was her nurse; then in quick succession four nursery maids, who were turned away, poor things! because Miss Anne could not abide them; then her brother Harry, by being born, and diminishing her importance; then three governesses; then two writingmasters; then one music mistress; then a whole school. On leaving school, affronts multiplied of course; and she has been in a constant miff with servants, tradespeople, relations and friends ever since; so that although really pretty (at least she would be so if it were not for a standing frown and a certain watchful defying look in her eyes,) decidedly clever and accomplished, and particularly charitable, as far as giving money goes, (your ill-tempered woman has often that redeeming grace,) she is known only by her one absorbing quality of touchiness, and is dreaded and hated accordingly by every one who has the honour of her acquaintance. sume to praise Jeanie Deans; thus cutting off his Majesty's lieges from the most approved topic of discussion among civilized people, a neutral ground as open and various as the weather, and far more delightful. But what did I say? The very weather is with her no prudent word. She pretends to skill in that science of guesses commonly called weatherwisdom, and a fog, or a shower, or a thunderstorm, or the blessed sun himself, may have been rash enough to contradict her bodements, and put her out of humour for the day. Her own name has all her life long been a fertile source of misery to this unfortunate lady. Her maiden name was Smythe, Anne Smythe. Now Smythe, although perfectly genteel and unexceptionable to look at, a pattern appellation on paper, was in speaking, no way distinguishable from the thousands of common Smiths who cumber the world. She never heard that "word of fear," especially when introduced to a new acquaintance, without looking as if she longed to spell it. Anne was bad enough; people had housemaids of that name, as if to make a confusion; and her grandmamma insisted on her omitting the final e, in which important vowel was seated all it could boast of elegance or dignity; and once a brother of fifteen, the identical brother Har Paying her a visit is one of the most formidable things that can be imagined, one of the trials which in a small way demand the greatest resolution. It is so difficult to find what to say. You must make up your mind to the affair as you do when going into a shower bath. Differing from her is obviously pulling the string; and agreeing with her too often or too pointedly is nearly as bad: she then suspects you of suspecting her infirmity, of which she has herself a glimmering consciousness, and treats you with a sharp touch of it accordingly. But what is there that she will not suspect? Admire the colours of ary, an Etonian, a pickle, one of that order of new carpet, and she thinks you are looking at clever boys who seem born for the torment of some invisible hole; praise the pattern of a their female relatives, "foredoomed their sismorning cap, and she accuses you of thinking ter's soul to cross," actually went so far as to it too gay. She has an ingenuity of perverse- call her Nancy! She did not box his ears, ness which brings all subjects nearly to a although how near her tingling fingers' ends level. The mention of her neighbours is evi- approached to that consummation, it is not my dently taboo, since it is at least twenty to one business to tell. Having suffered so much but she is in a state of affront with nine-tenths from the perplexity of her equivocal maiden of them; her own family are also taboo for the name, she thought herself most lucky in pitchsame reason. Books are particularly unsafe. ing on the thoroughly well-looking and wellShe stands vibrating on the pinnacle where sounding appellation of Morley for the rest of two fears meet, ready to be suspected of blue- her life. Mrs. Morley-nothing could be betstockingism on the one hand, or of ignorance ter. For once there was a word that did not and frivolity on the other, just as the work affront her. The first alloy to this satisfaction you may chance to name happens to be recon- was her perceiving on the bridal cards, Mr. dite or popular; nay sometimes the same pro- and Mrs. B. Morley, and hearing that close to duction shall excite both feelings. "Have their future residence lived a rich bachelor you read Hajji Baba," said I to her one day last uncle, till whose death that fearful diminution winter, "Hajji Baba the Persian"- "Real- of her consequence, the Mrs. B. must be enly, Ma'am, I am no orientalist.". "Hajji dured. Mrs. B.! The brow began to wrinBaba the clever Persian tale ?" continued kle-but it was the night before the wedding, I, determined not be daunted. "I believe, the uncle had made some compensation for Miss M." rejoined she, "that you think I the crime of being born thirty years before his have nothing better to do than to read novels." nephew in the shape of a superb set of emerAnd so she snip-snaps to the end of the visit. alds, and by a fortunate mistake, she had taken Even the Scotch novels, which she does own it into her head that B. in the present case, to reading, are no resource in her desperate stood for Basil, so that the loss of dignity case. There we are shipwrecked on the rocks being compensated by an increase of elegance, of taste. A difference there is fatal. She she bore the shock pretty well. It was not takes to those delicious books as personal pro- till the next morning during the ceremony, perty, and spreads over them the prickly shield that the full extent of her misery burst upon of her protection in the same spirit with which her, and she found that B. stood not for Basil, she appropriates her husband and her chil- but for Benjamin. Then the veil fell off; dren; is huffy if you prefer Guy Mannering then the full horror of her situation, the affront to the Antiquary, and quite jealous if you pre-of being a Mrs. Benjamin, stared her full in the face; and certainly but for the accident of being struck dumb by indignation, she never would have married a man so ignobly christened. Her fate has been even worse than then appeared probable; for her husband, an exceeding popular and convivial person, was known all over his own country by the familiar diminutive of his ill-omened appellation; so that she found herself not merely a Mrs. Benjamin, but a Mrs. Ben., the wife of a Ben Morley, junior, esq. (for the peccant uncle was also godfather and namesake) the future mother of a Ben Morley the third.-Oh the Miss Smith, the Anne, even the Nancy, shrunk into nothing when compared with that short word. Neither is she altogether free from misfortunes on her side of the house. There is a terrible mésalliance in her own family. Her favourite aunt, the widow of an officer with five portionless children, became one fair morning the wife of a rich mercer in Cheapside, thus at a stroke gaining comfort and losing caste. The manner in which this affected poor Mrs. Ben Morley is inconceivable. She talked of the unhappy connection, as aunts are wont to talk when nieces get paired at Gretna Green, wrote a formal renunciation of the culprit, and has considered herself insulted ever since if any one mentions a silk gown in her presence. Another affliction, brought on by her own family, is the production of a farce by her brother Harry, (born for her plague) at Covent Garden Theatre. The farce was damned, as the author (a clever young Templar) declares most deservedly. He bore the catastrophe with great heroism; and celebrated its downfall by venting sundry good puns and drinking an extra bottle of claret; leaving to Anne, sister Anne, the pleasant employment of fuming over his discomfiture-a task which she performed con amore. Actors, manager, audience and author, seventeen newspapers and three magazines, had the misfortune to displease her on this occasion; in short the whole town. Theatres and newspapers, critics and the drama, have been banished from her conversation ever since. She would as lieve talk of a silk-mercer. Next after her visiters, her correspondents are to be pitied; they had need look to their P's and Q's, their spelling and their stationary. If you write a note to her, be sure that the paper is the best double post, hot-pressed, and gilt-edged; that your pen is in good order; that your "dear Madams” have a proper mixture of regard and respect; and that your folding and sealings are unexceptionable. She is of a sort to faint at the absence of an envelope, and to die of a wafer. Note, above all, that your address be perfect; that your to be not forgotten; that the offending Benjamin be omitted; and that the style and title of her mansion, SHAWFORD MANOR HOUSE, be set forth in full glory. And when this is achieved, make up your mind to her taking some inexplicable affront after all. Thrice fortunate would he be who could put twenty words together without affronting her. Besides, she is great at a scornful reply, and shall keep up a quarrelling correspondence with any lady in Great Britain. Her letters are like challenges; and but for the protection of the petticoat, she would have fought fifty duels, and have been either killed or quieted long ago. If her husband had been of her temper, she would have brought him into twenty scrapes, but he is as unlike her as possible: a goodhumoured rattling creature, with a perpetual festivity of temper, and a propensity to motion and laughter, and all sorts of merry mischief, like a schoolboy in the holidays, which felicitous personage he resembles bodily in his round ruddy handsome face, his dancing black eyes, curling hair, and light active figure, the youngest man that ever saw forty. His pursuits have the same happy juvenility. In the summer he fishes and plays cricket; in the winter he hunts and courses; and what with grouse and partridges, pheasants and woodcocks, wood-pigeons and flappers, he contrives pretty tolerably to shoot all the year round. Moreover, he attends revels, races, assizes, and quarter-sessions; drives stage-coaches, patronizes plays, is steward to concerts, goes to every dance within forty miles, and talks of standing for the county; so that he has no time to quarrel with his wife, or for her, and affronts her twenty times an hour simply by giving her her own way. To the popularity of this universal favourite, for the restless sociability of his temper is invaluable in a dull country neighbourhood, his wife certainly owes the toleration which bids fair to render her incorrigible. She is fast approaching to the melancholy condition of a privileged person, one put out of the pale of civilized society. People have left off being angry with her, and begin to shrug up their shoulders and say its her way, a species of placability which only provokes her the more. For my part, I have too great a desire to obtain her good opinion to think of treating her in so shabby a manner; and as it is morally certain that we shall never be friends whilst we visit, I intend to try the effect of non-intercourse, and to break with her outright. If she reads this article, which is very likely, for she is addicted to new publications, and thinks herself injured if a book be put into her hands with the leaves cut,-if she reads only half a page she will inevitably have done with me for ever. If not, there can hardly be any lack of a sufficient quarrel in her company; and then, when we have ceased to speak or to curtsy, and fairly sent each other to Coventry, there can be no reason why we should not be on as civil terms as if the one lived at Calcutta, and the other at New York. JACK HATCH. of the storm of scolding with which the moIther follows her runaway steps. So the world wags till ten; then the little damsel gets admission to the charity school, and trips mincingly thither every morning, dressed in the old-fashioned blue gown, and white cap, and tippet, and bib and apron of that primitive institution, looking as demure as a nun, and as tidy; her thoughts fixed on button-holes, and spelling-books, those ensigns of promotion; despising dirt and base-ball, and all their joys. I PIQUE myself on knowing by sight, and by name, almost every man and boy in our parish, from eight years old to eighty-I cannot say quite so much for the women. They -the elder of them at least-are more within doors, more hidden. One does not meet them in the fields and highways; their duties are close housekeepers, and live under cover. The girls, to be sure, are often enough in sight, "true creatures of the element," basking in Then at twelve, the little lass comes home the sun, racing in the wind, rolling in the dust, again, uncapped, untippeted, unschooled ; dabbling in the water,-hardier, dirtier, noisier, brown as a berry, wild as a colt, busy as a more sturdy defiers of heat and cold, and bee-working in the fields, digging in the garwet, than boys themselves. One sees them den, frying rashers, boiling potatoes, shelling quite often enough to know them; but then beans, darning stockings, nursing children, the little elves alter so much at every step of feeding pigs, all these employments varied their approach to womanhood, that recognition by occasional fits of romping, and flirting, and becomes difficult, if not impossible. It is not idle play, according as the nascent coquetry, merely growing, boys grow;-it is positive, or the lurking love of sport, happens to preperplexing and perpetual change: a butterfly ponderate; merry, and pretty, and good with all hath not undergone more transmogrifications her little faults. It would be well if a country in its progress through life, than a village girl could stand at thirteen. Then she is belle in her arrival at the age of seventeen. charming. But the clock will move forward, The first appearance of the little lass is and at fourteen she gets a service in a neighsomething after the manner of a caterpillar, bouring town; and her next appearance is in crawling and creeping upon the grass, set the perfection of the butterfly state, fluttering, down to roll by some tired little nurse of an glittering, inconstant, vain, the gayest and eldest sister, or mother with her hands full. gaudiest insect that ever skimmed over a vilThere it lies-a fat, boneless, rosy piece of lage green. And this is the true progress of health, aspiring to the accomplishment of a rustic beauty, the average lot of our country walking and talking; stretching out its chub-girls; so they spring up, flourish, change and by limbs; scrambling and sprawling; laugh- disappear. Some indeed marry and fix amongst ing and roaring; there it sits, in all the dignity of the baby, adorned in a pink-checked frock, a blue spotted pinafore, and a little white cap, tolerably clean, and quite whole. One is forced to ask if it be boy or girl; for these hardy country rogues are all alike, openeyed, and weather-stained, and nothing fearing. There is no more mark of sex in the countenance than in the dress. In the next stage, dirt-encrusted enough to pass for the crysalis, if it were not so very unquiet, the gender remains equally uncertain. It is a fine, stout, curly-pated creature of three or four, playing and rolling about, amongst grass or mud, all day long; shouting, jumping, screeching-the happiest compound of noise and idleness, rags and rebellion, that ever trod the earth. us, and then ensues another set of changes, rather more gradual, perhaps, but quite as sure, till grey hairs, wrinkles, and linsey-woolsey, wind up the picture. All this is beside the purpose. If woman be a mutable creature, man is not. The wearers of smock frocks, in spite of the sameness of the uniform, are almost as easily distinguished by an interested eye, as a flock of sheep by the shepherd, or a pack of hounds by the huntsman: or to come to less affronting similes, the members of the House of Commons by the Speaker, or the gentlemen of the bar by the Lord Chief Justice. There is very little change in them from early boyhood." "The child is father to the man" in more senses than one. There is a constancy about them; they keep the same faces, howThen comes a sunburnt gipsy of six, begin- ever ugly; the same habits, however strange; ning to grow tall and thin, and to find the the same fashions however unfashionable; cares of the world gathering about her; with they are in nothing new-fangled. Tom Coper, a pitcher in one hand, a mop in the other, an for instance, man and boy, is and has been adold straw bonnet of ambiguous shape, half dicted to posies,-from the first polyanthus to hiding her tangled hair; a tattered stuff petti- the last China rose, he has always a nosegay coat, once green, hanging below an equally in his button hole; George Simmons may be tattered cotton frock, once purple; her longing eyes fixed on a game of base-ball at the corner of the green, till she reaches the cottage door, flings down the mop and pitcher, and darts off to her companions, quite regardless known a mile off, by an eternal red waistcoat; Jem Tanner, summer and winter, by the smartest of all smart straw hats; and Joel Brent, from the day that he left off petticoats, has always, in every dress and every situation, look ed like a study for a painter-no mistaking him. Yes! I know every man and boy of note in the parish, with one exception, one most signal exception, which "haunts and startles and waylays” me at every turn. I do not know, and I begin to fear that I never shall know Jack Hatch. beat us. quiries as to this great player were received with utter astonishment. "Who is Jack Hatch ?" "Not know Jack Hatch!" There was no end to the wonder-" not to know him argued myself unknown." "Jack Hatchthe best cricketer in the parish, in the county, in the country! Jack Hatch, who had got seven notches at one hit! Jack Hatch, who had trolled, and caught out a whole eleven! Jack Hatch, who besides these marvellous best musician in the hundred,-could dance a hornpipe and a minuet, sing a whole songbook, bark like a dog, mew like a cat, crow like a cock, and go through Punch from beginning to end! Not know Jack Hatch!" Half ashamed of my non-acquaintance with this admirable Crichton of rural accomplishments, I determined to find him out as soon as possible, and I have been looking for him more or less, ever since. The cricket-ground and the bowling-green were of course, the first places of search; but he was always just gone, or not come, or he was there yesterday, or he is expected to-morrow-a to-morrow which, as far as I am concerned, never arrives ;-the stars were against me. Then I directed my attention to his other acquirements; and once followed a balladsinger half a mile, who turned out to be a strapping woman in a man's great-coat; and another time pierced a whole mob of urchins to get at a capital Punch-when behold, it was the genuine man of puppets, the true squeakery, the "real Simon Pure," and Jack was 'as much to seek as ever. The first time I had occasion to hear of this worthy, was on a most melancholy occurrence. We have lost-I do not like to talk about it, but I cannot tell my story without-gifts in cricket, was the best bowler and the we have lost a cricket match, been beaten, and soundly too, by the men of Beech-hill, a neighbouring parish. How this accident happened, I cannot very well tell; the melancholy fact is sufficient. The men of Beech-hill, famous players, in whose families cricket is an hereditary accomplishment, challenged and After our defeat, we began to comfort ourselves by endeavouring to discover how this misfortune could possibly have befallen. Every one that has ever had a cold, must have experienced the great consolation that is derived from puzzling out the particular act of imprudence from which it sprang, and we on the same principle, found our affliction somewhat mitigated by the endeavour to trace it to its source. One laid the catastrophe to the wind. -a very common scapegoat in the catarrhal calamity-which had, as it were, played us booty, carrying our adversary's balls right and ours wrong; another laid it to a certain catch missed by Tom Willis, by which means Farmer Thackum, the pride and glory of the Beech-hillers, had two innings; a third to the aforesaid Thackum's remarkable manner of bowling, which is cir- At last I thought that I had actually caught cular, so to say, that is, after taking aim, he him, and on his own peculiar field, the cricketmakes a sort of chassée on one side, before he ground. We abound in rustic fun, and good delivers his ball, which pantomimic motion humour, and of course in nick-names. A had a great effect on the nerves of our eleven, certain senior of fifty, or thereabout, for inunused to such quadrilling; a fourth imputed stance, of very juvenile habits and inclinaour defeat to the over-civility of our umpire, tions, who plays at ball, and marbles, and George Gosseltine, a sleek, smooth, silky, soft-spoken person, who stood with his little wand under his arm, smiling through all our disasters-the very image of peace and good humour; whilst their umpire, Bob Coxe, a roystering, roaring, bullying blade, bounced, and hectored, and blustered from his wicket, with the voice of a twelve-pounder; the fifth assented to this opinion, with some extension, asserting that the universal impudence of their side took advantage of the meekness and modesty of ours, (N. B. it never occurred to our modesty, that they might be the best players) which flattering persuasion appeared likely to prevail, in fault of a better, when all on a sudden, the true reason of our defeat seemed to burst at once from half a dozen voices, reechoed like a chorus by all the others "It was entirely owing to the want of Jack Hatch! How could we think of playing without Jack Hatch!" This was the first I heard of him. My in cricket, with all the boys in the parish, and joins a kind merry buoyant heart to an aspect somewhat rough and care-worn, has no other appellation that ever I heard but "Uncle;" I don't think, if by any strange chance he were called by it, that he would know his own name. On the other hand, a little stunted pragmatical urchin, son and heir of Dick Jones, an absolute old man cut shorter, so slow, and stiff, and sturdy, and wordy, passes universally by the title of "Grandfather"-I have not the least notion that he would answer to Dick. Also a slim, grim-looking, whiteheaded lad, whose hair is bleached, and his skin browned by the sun, till he is as hideous as an Indian idol, goes, good lack! by the pastoral misnomer of the "Gentle Shepherd." Oh manes of Allan Ramsay! the Gentle Shepherd! Another youth, regular at cricket, but never seen except then, of unknown parish, and parentage, and singular uncouthness of person, |