reign; one who had dangled after her during the long courtship of the three calendars; one who was the handiest and most complaisant of wooers, always ready to fill up an interval, like a book, which can be laid aside when company comes in, and resumed a month afterwards at the very page and line where the - I hope that her choice has been fortunate; it is certainly very different from what we all expected. The happy man had been a neighbour, (not on the side of the acacia-trees,) and on his removal to a greater distance the marriage took place. Poor dear Lucy! her spouse is the greatest possible contrast to herself; ten years younger at the very least; welllooking, but with no expression good or bad were three one-eyed lovers, like the three one-eyed calendars in the "Arabian Nights." They were much about the same period, nearly contemporaries, and one of them had nearly carried off the fair Helen. If he had had two eyes, his success would have been certain. She said yes and no, and yes again; he was a very nice young man- -but that one eye-reader left off. I think it was an affair of that unlucky one eye!-and the being rallied amusement and convenience on both sides. on her three calendars. There was no get- Lucy never intended to marry this commoditing over that one eye: she said no, once ous stopper of love gaps; and he, though he more, and stood firm. And yet the pendulum courted her for ten mortal years, never made might have continued to vibrate many times a direct offer, till after the banns were publonger, had it not been fixed by the athletic lished between her and her present husband: charms of a gigantic London tailor, a superb then, indeed, he said he was sorry — he had man, really; black-haired, black-eyed, six feet hoped-was it too late? and so forth. Ah! high, and large in proportion. He came to his sorrow was nothing to ours, and, when it improve the country fashions, and fixed his came to the point, nothing to Lucy's. She shop-board in a cottage so near us that his cried every day for a fortnight, and had not garden was only divided from our lawn by a her successor in office, the new housemaid, plantation full of acacias and honey-suckles, arrived, I do really believe that this lover where "the air smelt wooingly." It followed would have shared the fate of the many sucof course that he should make love to Lucy, cessors to the unfortunate tailor. and that Lucy should listen. All was speedily settled; as soon as he should be established in a good business, which, from his incomparable talent at cutting out, nobody could doubt, they were to be married. But they had not calculated on the perversity of country taste; he was too good a workman; his suits fitted over well; his employers missed certain accustomed awkwardnesses and redundancies which passed for beauties; be--I don't think he could smile, if he wouldsides, the stiffness and tightness which distinguished the new coat of the ancien regime, were wanting in the make of this daring innovator. The shears of our Bond-street cutter were as powerful as the wooden sword of Harlequin; he turned his clowns into gentlemen, and their brother clod-hoppers laughed at them, and they were ashamed. So the poor tailor lost his customers and his credit; and just as he had obtained Lucy's consent to the marriage, he walked off one fair morning, and was never heard of more. Lucy's absorbing feeling on this catastrophe was astonishment, pure unmixed astonishment! One would have thought that she considered fickleness as a female privilege, and had never heard of a man deserting a woman in her life. For three days she could only wonder; then came great indignation, and a little, a very little grief, which showed itself not so much in her words, which were chiefly such disclaimers as "I don't care! very lucky! happy escape!" and so on, as in her goings and doings, her aversion to the poor acacia grove, and even to the sight and smell of honeysuckles, her total loss of memory, and above all, in the distaste she showed to new conquests. She paid her faithless suitor the compliment of remaining loverless for three weary months; and when she relented a little, she admitted no fresh adorer, nothing but an old hangeron; one not quite discarded during the tailor's assuredly he never tries; well made, but as stiff as a poker; I dare say he never ran three yards in his life; perfectly steady, sober, honest, and industrious; but so young, so grave, so dull! one of your "demure boys," as Fallstaff calls them, "that never come to proof." You might guess a mile off that he was a schoolmaster, from the swelling pomposity of gait, the solemn decorum of manner, the affectation of age and wisdom, which contrast so oddly with his young unmeaning face. The moment he speaks, you are certain. Nobody but a village pedagogue ever did or ever could talk like Mr. Brown,-ever displayed such elaborate politeness, such a study of phrases, such choice words and long words, and fine words and hard words! He speaks by the book,the spelling book, and is civil after the fashion of the Polite Letter-Writer. He is so entirely without tact, that he does not in the least understand the impression produced by his wife's delightful manners, and interrupts her perpetually to speechify and apologise, and explain and amend. He is fond of her, nevertheless, in his own cold, slow way, and proud of her, and grateful to her friends, and a very good kind of young man altogether; only that I cannot quite forgive him for taking Lucy away in the first place, and making her a school-mistress in the second. She a school-mistress, a keeper of silence, a maintainer of discipline, a scold er, a punisher! Ah! she would rather be information; I should never have guessed that scolded herself; it would be a far lighter pun- there was any difference, except in colour, beishment. Lucy likes her vocation as little as tween the man and the woman, the dog and I do. She has not the natural love of chil- the cat; they were in form, height, and size, dren, which would reconcile her to the evils alike to a thread; the man grey, the woman they cause; and she has a real passion for pink, his attendant white, and her's black. cleanliness, a fiery spirit of dispatch, which Next to these figures, on either side, rose two cannot endure the dust and litter created by fir-trees from two red flower-pots, nice little the little troop on the one hand, or their tor-round bushes of a bright green intermixed menting slowness and stupidity on the other. with brown stitches, which Lucy explained, She was the quickest and neatest of work- not to me.-"Don't you see the fir-cones, women, piqued herself on completing a shirt Sir? Don't you remember how fond she used or a gown sooner and better than seemed possible, and was scandalized at finding such talents degraded to the ignoble occupations of tacking a quarter of a yard of hemming for one, pinning half a seam for another, picking out the crooked stitching of a third, and working over the weak irregular burst-out buttonhole of a fourth. When she first went to to be of picking them up in her little basket at the dear old place? Poor thing, I thought of her all the time that I was working them! Don't you like the fir-cones?"-After this, I looked at the landscape almost as lovingly as Lucy herself. With all her dislike to keeping school, the dear Lucy seems happy. In addition to the she was strongly tempted to do all the merciful spirit of conformity, which shapes work herself. The children would have the mind to the situation, whatever that may liked it," said she, "and really I don't think be, she has many sources of vanity and comthe mothers would have objected; they care fort her house above all. It is a very refor nothing but marking. There are seven spectable dwelling, finely placed on the edge girls now in the school working samplers to of a large common, close to a high-road, with be framed. Such a waste of silk, and time, a pretty flower-court before it, shaded by four and trouble! I said to Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. horse-chestnuts cut into arches, a sashed winSmith said to me"-Then she recounted the dow on either side of the door, and on the whole battle of the samplers, and her defeat; door a brass knocker, which being securely and then she sent for one which, in spite of nailed down, serves as a quiet peaceable hanher declaration that her girls never finished dle for all goers, instead of the importunate any thing, was quite completed (probably and noisy use for which it was designed. with a good deal of her assistance), and of Jutting out at one end of the court is a small which, notwithstanding her rational objection stable; retiring back at the other, a large to its uselessness, Lucy was not a little proud. school-room; and behind, a yard for children, She held it up with great delight, pointed out pigs, and poultry, a garden, and an arbour. all the beauties, selected her own favourite The inside is full of comfort; miraculously parts, especially a certain square rose-bud, clean and orderly for a village school, and and the landscape at the bottom; and finally with a little touch of very allowable finery in pinned it against the wall, to show the effect the gay window-curtains, the cupboard full it would have when framed. Really, that of pretty china, the handsome chairs, the sampler was a superb thing in its way. First came a plain pink border; then a green border, zig-zag; then a crimson, wavy; then a brown, of a different and more complicated zig-zag; then the alphabet, great and small, In every colour of the rainbow, followed by a Tow of figures, flanked on one side by a flower, name unknown, tulip, poppy, lily, something orange or scarlet, or orange-scarlet; on the other by the famous rose-bud; the divers sentences, religious and moral;-Lucy was quite provoked with me for not being able to read them: I dare say she thought in her heart that I was as stupid as any of her scholars; but Lucy's pleasure is in her house; mine is in never was MS. so illegible, not even my own, its situation. The common on which it stands as the print work of that sampler-then, last is one of a series of heathy hills, or rather a and finest, the landscape, in all its glory. It high table-land, pierced in one part by a occupied the whole narrow line at the bottom, ravine of marshy ground, filled with alder composed with great regularity. In bushes growing larger and larger as the valthe centre was a house of a bright scarlet, ley widens, and at last mixing with the fine with yellow windows, a green door, and a old oaks of the forest of P. Nothing blue roof: on one side, a man with a dog; on can be more delightful than to sit on the steep the other, a woman with a cat-this is Lucy's brow of the hill, amongst the fragrant heath and was bright mahogany table, the shining tea-urn, and brilliant tea-tray, that decorate the parlour. What a pleasure it is to see Lucy presiding in that parlour, in all the glory of her honest affection and her warm hospitality, making tea for the three guests whom she loves best in the world, vaunting with courteous pride her home-made bread and her fresh butter, yet thinking nothing good enough for the occasion; smiling and glowing, and looking the very image of beautiful happiness.Such a moment almost consoles us for losing her. flowers, the blue-bells, and the wild thyme, and look upon the sea of trees spreading out beneath us; the sluggish water just peeping from amid the alders, giving brightly back the bright blue sky; and, farther down, herds of rough ponies, and of small stunted cows, the wealth of the poor, coming up from the forest. I have sometimes seen two hundred of these cows together, each belonging to a different person, and distinguishing and obeying the call of its milker. All the boundaries of this heath are beautiful. On one side is the hanging coppice, where the lily of the valley grows so plentifully amongst broken ridges and foxearths, and the roots of pollard-trees. On another are the immense fir plantations of Mr. B., whose balmy odour hangs heavily in the air, or comes sailing on the breeze like smoke across the landscape. Farther on, beyond the pretty parsonage-house, with its short avenue, its fish-ponds, and the magnificent poplars which form a landmark for many miles round, rise the rock-like walls of the old city of S- one of the most perfect Roman remains now existing in England. The wall can be traced all round, rising sometimes to a height of twenty feet, over a deep narrow slip of meadow land, once the ditch, and still full of aquatic flowers. The ground within rises level with the top of the wall, which is of grey stone, crowned with the finest forest trees, whose roots 'seem interlaced with the old masonry, and covered with wreaths of ivy, brambles, and a hundred other trailing plants. Close by one of the openings, which mark the site of the gates, is a graduated terrace, called by antiquaries the Amphitheatre, which commands a rich and extensive view, and is backed by the village church and an old farm-house, the sole buildings in that once populous city, whose streets are now traced only by the blighted and withered appearance of the ripening corn. Roman coins and urns are often ploughed up there, and it is a favourite haunt of the lovers of "hoar antiquity." But the beauty of the place is independent of its noble associations. The very heart expands in the deep verdure and perfect loneliness of that narrow winding valley, fenced on one side by steep coppices or its own tall irregular hedge, on the other by the venerable crag-like wall, whose proud coronet of trees, its jutting ivy, its huge twisted thorns, its briery festoons, and the deep caves where the rabbits burrow, make the old bulwark seem no work of man, but a majestic piece of nature. As a picture it is exquisite. Nothing can be finer than the mixture of those varied greens so crisp and life-like, with the crumbling grey stone; nothing more perfectly in harmony with the solemn beauty of the place, than the deep cooings of the woodpigeons, who abound in the walls. I know no pleasure so intense, so soothing, so apt to bring sweet tears into the eyes, or to awaken thoughts that "lie too deep for tears," as a walk round the old city on a fine summer evening. A ride to S- was always delightful to me, even before it became the residence of Lucy; it is now my prime festival. WALKS IN THE COUNTRY. THE FIRST PRIMROSE. MARCH 6th.Fine March weather: boisterous, blustering, much wind and squalls of rain; and yet the sky, where the clouds are swept away, deliciously blue, with snatches of sunshine, bright, and clear, and healthful, and the roads, in spite of the slight glittering showers, crisply dry. Altogether, the day is tempting, very tempting. It will not do for the dear common, that windmill of a walk; but the close sheltered lines at the bottom of the hill, which keep out just enough of the stormy air, and let in all the sun, will be delightful. Past our old house, and round by the winding lanes, and the work-house, and across the lea, and so into the turnpike-road again, that is our route for to-day. Forth we set, May-flower and I, rejoicing in the sunshine, and still more in the wind, which gives such an intense feeling of existence, and cooperating with brisk motion sets our blood and our spirits in a glow. For mere physical pleasure there is nothing perhaps equal to the enjoyment of being drawn, in a light carriage, against such a wind as this, by a blood horse at his height of speed. Walking comes next to it; but walking is not quite so luxurious or so spiritual, not quite so much what one fancies of flying, or being carried above the clouds in a balloon. Nevertheless, a walk is a good thing; especially under this southern hedgerow, where nature is just beginning to live again: the perriwinkles, with their starry blue flowers, and their shining myrtle-like leaves, garlanding the bushes; woodbines and elder trees, pushing out their small swelling buds; and grasses and mosses springing forth in every variety of brown and green. Here we are at the corner where four lanes meet, or rather where a passable road of stones and gravel crosses an impassable one of beautiful but treacherous turf, and where the small white farm-house, scarcely larger than a cottage, and the well-stocked rick-yard behind, tell of comfort and order, but leave all unguessed the great riches of the master. How he became so rich is almost a puzzle; for though the farm be his own, it is not large; and, though prudent and frugal on ordinary occasions, farmer Barnard is no miser. His horses, dogs, and pigs, are the best kept in the parish,-May herself, although her beauty be injured by her fatness, half envies the plight of his bitch Fly; his wife's gowns and shawls cost as much again as any shawls or gowns in the village: his dinner parties (to be sure they are not frequent) display twice the ordinary quantity of good things-two couples of ducks, two dishes of green peas, two turkey poults, two gammons of bacon, two plum-puddings; moreover, he keeps a single-horse chaise, and has built and endowed a Methodist chapel. Yet is he the richest man in these parts. Every thing prospers with him. Money drifts about him like snow. He looks like a rich man. There is a sturdy squareness of face and figure; a good-humoured obstinacy; a civil importance. He never boasts of his wealth, or gives himself undue airs; but nobody can meet him at market or vestry without finding out immediately that he is the richest man there. They have no child to all this money; but there is an adopted nephew, a fine spirited lad, who may, perhaps, some day or other, play the part of a fountain to the reservoir. Now turn up the wide road till we come to the open common, with its park-like trees, its beautiful stream, wandering and twisting along, and its rural bridge. Here we turn again, past that other white farm-house, half hidden by the magnificent elms which stand before it. Ah! riches dwell not there; but there is found the next best thing-an industrious and light-hearted poverty. Twenty years ago Rachel Hilton was the prettiest and merriest lass in the country. Her father, an old game-keeper, had retired to a village alehouse, where his good beer, his social humour, and his black-eyed daughter, brought much custom. She had lovers by the score; but Joseph White, the dashing and lively son of an opulent farmer, carried off the fair Rachel. They married and settled here, and here they live still, as merrily as ever, with fourteen children of all ages and sizes, from nineteen years to nineteen months, working harder than any people in the parish, and enjoying themselves more. I would match them for labour and laughter against any family in England. She is a blithe, jolly dame, whose beauty has amplified into comeliness: he is tall, and thin, and bony, with sinews like whipcord, a strong lively voice, a sharp, weather-beaten face, and eyes and lips that smile and brighten when he speaks into a most contagious hilarity. They are very poor, and I often wish them richer; but I don't know-perhaps it might put them out. Quite close to farmer White's is a little ruinous cottage, white-washed once, and now in a sad state of betweenity, where dangling stockings and shirts swelled by the wind, drying in a neglected garden, give signal of a washerwoman. There dwells, at present in a state of single blessedness, Betty Adams, the wife of our sometimes gardener. I never saw any one who so much reminded me in person of that lady whom every body knows, Mistress Meg Merrilies;-as tall, as grizzled, as stately, as dark, as gipsy-looking, bonneted and gowned like her prototype, and almost as oracular. Here the resemblance ceases. Mrs. Adams is a perfectly honest, industrious, pains-taking person, who earns a good deal of money by washing and charing, and spends it in other luxuries than tidiness,-in green tea, and gin, and snuff. Her husband lives in a great family ten miles off. He is a capital gardeneror rather he would be so, if he were not too ambitious. He undertakes all things, and finishes none. But a smooth tongue, a knowing look, and a great capacity of labour, carry him through. Let him but like his ale and his master, and he will do work enough for four. Give him his own way, and his full quantum, and nothing comes amiss to him. Ah, May is bounding forward! Her silly heart leaps at the sight of the old place-and so, in good truth, does mine. What a pretty place it was, or rather, how pretty I thought it! I suppose I should have thought any place so where I had spent eighteen happy years. But it was really pretty. A large, heavy, white house, in the simplest style, surrounded by fine oaks and elms, and tall massy plantations shaded down into a beautiful lawn, by wild overgrown shrubs, bowery acacias, ragged sweet-briars, promontories of dogwood, and Portugal laurel, and bays overhung by laburnum and bird-cherry; a long piece of water letting light into the picture, and looking just like a natural stream, the banks as rude and wild as the shrubbery, interspersed with broom, and furze, and bramble, and pollard oaks covered with ivy and honeysuckle; the whole enclosed by an old mossy park paling, and terminating in a series of rich meadows, richly planted. This is an exact description of the home which, three years ago, it nearly broke my heart to leave. What a tearing up by the roots it was! I have pitied cabbage plants and celery, and all transplantable things, ever since; though, in common with them and with other vegetables, the first agony of the transportation being over, I have taken such firm and tenacious hold of my new soil, that I would not for the world be pulled up again, even to be restored to the old beloved ground; not even if its beauty were undiminished, which is by no means the case; for in those three years it has thrice changed masters, and every successive possessor has brought the curse of improvement upon the place: so that between filling up the water to cure dampness, cutting down trees to let in prospects, planting to keep them out, shutting up windows to darken the inside of the house, (by which means one end looks precisely as an eight of spades would do that should have the misfortune to lose one of his corner pips,) and building colonnades to lighten the out, added to a gen eral clearance of pollards, and brambles, and ivy, and honeysuckles, and park palings, and irregular shrubs, the poor place is so transmogrified, that if it had its old looking-glass, the water, back again, it would not know its own face. And yet I love to haunt round about it so does May. Her particular attraction is a certain broken bank full of rabbit burrows, into which she insinuates her long pliant head and neck, and tears her pretty feet by vain scratchings: mine is a warm sunny hedgerow, in the same remote field, famous for early flowers. Never was a spot more variously flowery: primroses yellow, lilac white, violets of either hue, cowslips, oxlips, arums, orchises, wild hyacinths, ground ivy, pansies, strawberries, heart's-ease, formed a small part of the Flora of that wild hedgerow. How profusely they covered the sunny open slope under the weeping birch, "the lady of the woods," and how often have I started to see the carly innocent brown snake, who loved the spot as well as I did, winding along the young blossoms, or rustling among the fallen leaves! There are primrose leaves already, and short green buds, but no flowers; not even in that furze cradle so full of roots, where they used to blow as in a basket. No, my May, no rabbits! no primroses! We may as well get over the gate into the woody winding lane, which will bring us home again. Here we are, making the best of our way between the old elms that arch so solemnly over head, dark and sheltered even now. They say that a spirit haunts this deep pool a white lady without a head. I cannot say that I have seen her, often as I have paced this lane at deep midnight, to hear the nightingales, and look at the glow-worms;-but there, better and rarer than a thousand ghosts, dearer even than nightingales and glow-worms, there is a primrose, the first of the year; a tuft of primroses, springing in yonder sheltered nook, from the mossy roots of an old willow, and living again in the clear bright pool. Oh, how beautiful they are- -three fully blown, and two bursting buds! how glad I am I came this way! They are not to be reached. Even Jack Rapley's love of the difficult and the unattainable would fail him here: May herself could not stand on that steep bank. So much the better. Who would wish to disturb them? There they live in their innocent and their fragrant beauty, sheltered from the storms, and rejoicing in the sunshine, and looking as if they could feel their happiness. Who would disturb them? Oh, how glad I am I came this way home! BRAMLEY MAYING. MR. GEOFFREY CRAYON has, in his delightful but somewhat fanciful writings, brought into general view many old sports and customs, some of which, indeed, still linger about the remote counties, familiar as local peculiarities to their inhabitants, whilst the greater part lie buried in books of the Elizabethan age, known only to the curious in English literature. One rural custom which would have enchanted him, and which prevails in the north of Hampshire, he has not noticed, and probably does not know. Did any of my readers ever hear of a Maying? Let not any notions of chimney-sweeps soil the imagination of the gay Londoner! A country Maying is altogether a different affair from the street exhibitions which mix so much pity with our mirth, and do the heart good, perhaps, but not by gladdening it. A country Maying is a meeting of the lads and lasses of two or three parishes, who assemble in certain erections of green boughs, called May-houses, to dance and-but I am going to tell all about it in due order, and must not forestall my description. Last year we went to Bramley Maying. There had been two or three such merrymakings before in that inaccessible neighbourhood, where the distance of large towns, the absence of great houses, and the consequent want of all decent roads, together with a country of peculiar wildness and beauty, combine to produce a sort of modern Arcadia. We had intended to assist at a Maying in the forest of Pamber, thinking that the deep glades of that fine woodland scenery would be more congenial to the spirit of old English merriment, as it breathed more of Robin Hood and Maid Marian than a mere village green-to say nothing of its being of the two more accessible by four-footed and two-wheeled conveyances. But the Pamber day had been suffered to pass, and Brambley was the last Maying of the season. So to Bramley we went. As we had a considerable distance to go, we set out about noon, intending to return to dinner at six. Never was a day more congenial to a happy purpose! It was a day made for country weddings and dances on the green -a day of dazzling light, of ardent sunshine falling on hedge-rows and meadows fresh with spring showers. You might almost see the grass grow and the leaves expand under the influence of that vivifying warmth; and we passed through the well-known and beautiful scenery of W. Park, and the pretty village of M., with a feeling of new admiration, as if we had never before felt their charms; so gloriously did the trees in their young leaves, the grass springing beneath them, the patches of golden broom and deeper furze, the cottages covered with roses, the blooming orchards, and the light snowy sprays of the cherry-trees tossing their fair blossoms across the deep-blue sky, pour upon the eye the full magic of colour. On we passed gaily and happily as far as we knew our way-perhaps |