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.

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

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.

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 morn-eyes, curling hair, and light active figure, the ing 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

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 HAТСН.

of the storm of scolding with which the mother 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; laughing 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.

disappear. Some indeed marry and fix amongst 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 long- known a mile off, by an eternal red waistcoat; ing eyes fixed on a game of base-ball at the Jem Tanner, summer and winter, by the smartcorner of the green, till she reaches the cottage est of all smart straw hats; and Joel Brent, door, flings down the mop and pitcher, and from the day that he left off petticoats, has aldarts off to her companions, quite regardlessways, in every dress and every situation, look

ed like a study for a painter-no mistaking quiries as to this great player were received him. Yes! I know every man and boy of with utter astonishment. "Who is Jack note in the parish, with one exception,-one Hatch?" "Not know Jack Hatch !" There most signal exception, which "haunts and was no end to the wonder-" not to know him startles and waylays" me at every turn. I do argued myself unknown." "Jack Hatchnot know, and I begin to fear that I never shall the best cricketer in the parish, in the county, know Jack Hatch. 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 gifts in cricket, was the best bowler and the 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 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 beat us. 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. 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

A

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". 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!

I

Another youth, regular at cricket, but never seen except then, of unknown parish, and parentage, and singular uncouthness of person,

most remote and discrepant issue in Jack Hatch. He caught Dame Wheeler's squirrel; the Magpie at the Rose owes to him the half dozen phrases with which he astounds and delights the passers-by; the very dog Tero, an animal of singular habits, who sojourns occasionally at half the houses in the village, making each his home till he is affronted Tero himself, best and ugliest of finders-a mongrel compounded of terrier, cur, and spaniel-Tero, most remarkable of ugly dogs, inasmuch as he constantly squints, and commonly goes on three legs, holding up first one, and then the other, out of a sort of quadrupedal economy to ease those useful members-Tero himself is said to belong of right and origin to Jack Hatch.

dress, and demeanour, rough as a badger, ragged as a colt, and sour as verjuice, was known, far more appropriately, by the cognomen of "Oddity." Him, in my secret soul, I pitched on for Jack Hatch. In the first place, as I had in the one case a man without a name, and in the other a name without a man, to have found these component parts of individuality meet in the same person, to have made the man to fit the name, and the name fit the man, would have been as pretty a way of solving two enigmas at once, as hath been heard of since (Edipus his day. But besides the obvious convenience and suitability of this belief, I had divers other corroborating reasons. Oddity was young, so was Jack;-Oddity came up the hill from leaward, so must Jack; -Oddity was a capital cricketer, so was Jack; Every where that name meets me. "Twas -Oddity did not play in our unlucky Beech- but a few weeks ago that I heard him asked hill match, neither did Jack ;—and, last of all, in church, and a day or two afterwards I saw Oddity's name was Jack, a fact I was fortunate the tail of the wedding procession, the little enough to ascertain from a pretty damsel who lame clerk handing the bridemaid, and a girl walked up with him to the ground one even- from the Rose running after them with pipes, ing, and who on seeing him bowl out Tom passing by our house. Nay, this very mornCoper, could not help exclaiming in a solilo- ing, some one was speaking- Dead! what quy, as she stood a few yards behind us, dead? Jack Hatch dead?-a name, a shadow, looking on with all her heart, "Well done, a Jack o' lantern! Can Jack Hatch die? Hath Jack!" That moment built up all my hopes; he the property of mortality? Can the bell the next knocked them down. I thought I toll for him? Yes! there is the coffin and the had clutched him, but willing to make assur- pall—all that I shall ever see of him is there! ance doubly sure, I turned to my pretty neigh--There are his comrades following in decent bour, (Jack Hatch too had a sweetheart) and sorrow-and the poor pretty bride, leaning on said in a tone half affirmative, half interroga- the little clerk-My search is over-. tory, "That young man who plays so well is Hatch is dead! Jack Hatch ?" No, ma'am, Jack Bolton!" and Jack Hatch remained still a sound, a name, a mockery.

Well at last I ceased to look for him, and might possibly have forgotten my curiosity, had not every week produced some circumstance to relumine that active female passion.

I seemed beset by his name, and his presence, invisibly as it were. Will of the wisp is nothing to him; Puck, in that famous Midsummer Dream, was a quiet goblin compared to Jack Hatch. He haunts one in dark places. The fiddler, whose merry tones come ringing across the orchard in a winter's night from Farmer White's barn, setting the whole village a dancing, is Jack Hatch. The whistler, who trudges homeward at dusk up Kibe's lanes, out-piping the nightingale, in her own month of May, is Jack Hatch. And the indefatigable learner of the bassoon, whose drone, all last harvest, might be heard in the twilight, issuing from the sexton's dwelling on the Little Lea, "making night hideous," that iniquitous practiser is Jack Hatch.

The name meets me all manner of ways. I have seen it in the newspaper for a prize of pinks; and on the back of a warrant on the charge of poaching;-N. B., the constable had my luck, and could not find the culprit, otherwise I might have had some chance of seeing him on that occasion. Things the

er-Jack

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.

MY SCHOOL-FELLOWS.
"Five pupils were my stint, the other
I took to compliment his mother."
PLEADER'S GUIDE.

ALL the world knows what a limited number of pupils means; our stint was twenty; and really, considering the temptations of great girls, very great girls, too old to learn, as parlour-boarders; and little girls, very little girls, too young to learn, as pets, we kept to it vastly well. We were not often more than thirty; principally because the house would not, with a proper regard to health and accommodation -points never forgotten by our excellent-intentioned governess-conveniently contain a greater number. If the next house could have been procured, we should soon have increased to fifty; and, indeed, might have gone on gradually multiplying till we had travelled half round the square: for Mrs. S. had always a difficulty in saying no-that ugliest of monosyllables-and the task was not rendered easier when she was beset by the mingled temptations of interest, flattery, and affection. It

mystery, the importance! The whole school was on tiptoe to find out the secret, and the confidante was in great danger of telling, when, luckily for her reputation, the secret told itself. One fine night, when the moon shone brightly, the fair Tilburina set off for Gretna Green. After this we had no more parlour-boarders.

was best as it was; we were quite enough, even though, early in my abode, a lucky accident incident to the state ridded us of those anomalous personages, the parlour-boarders. An old pupil having arrived at the presentation age, seventeen, and her guardians not knowing exactly what to do with her, she was continued in H. P. upon that footing. I shall never forget the difference that one day But although we had no more parlourmade in this fair damsel. Translated on a boarders, we were fertile in great girls,sudden from the school-room to the drawing- young ladies sent from the country for "imroom! preferred at once over the heads of her provement," as the milliners say, who, after fellows! I never saw such a change. Per- a seven years' apprenticeship in some provinhaps a parvenu of the French Revolution might cial fashion-shop, come up to the capital to be be something like it, or a boy officer in his finished: (alas! they generally found that they first regimentals, or a knight of the last edi- had to begin)-or the desperately naughty and tion, or an author the night of a successful the hopelessly dull, banished from home to be play, or a court beauty in her birth-day plumes, out of the way, and to try what school would or any other shuttlecock pate, giddy with hap-do;— or the luckless daughters of the newly piness and vanity. She was no worse, poor wealthy, on whom the magic air of a London thing, than most girls of seventeen or eighteen; seminary was expected to work as sudden a that transition state when learning is laid aside transformation as the wand of Cinderella's and knowledge not come; she was ostenta- fairy godmother. They were the most to be tiously idle always, and affrontingly gracious, pitied. How often, during the fiery ordeal of or astoundingly impertinent by fits and starts the first half-year, they must have wished patronised one day and forgot the next. themselves poor again!-The most interestNo M. P. freshly elected for an independent ing of these unfortunate rich people were three borough, ever experienced a more sudden loss sisters from Orkney, the youngest past sixteen, of memory. There was nothing remarkable whose mother had unexpectedly succeeded to in this but unluckily nature never intended the large inheritance of an Indian cousin. our poor parvenue for a lady of consequence. They were gentlewomen born and bred, these She was born to be a child all her days! and, Minnas and Brendas of the Shetland islands, which was much worse, to look like one;- though as wild and unformed and as much the most insignificant little fair-haired girl that used to liberty as their country ponies. Unever lived. Dress did nothing for her; her accomplished they were of course, but they very milliner gave her up in despair. Gowns could never have been thought ignorant any turned into frocks when tied round her slim where but in a London school. The mistake straight waist;-caps, turbans, feathers, muffs, lay in sending them there, amongst a tribe of all artificial means of giving age, and size, little pedants, with all the scaffolding of learnand importance, failed in this unfortunate case. ing about them. The eldest bore the transiNever did a faded beauty take so much pains tion pretty well. She had health too delicate to look like a girl, as she did to look like a to enjoy in all its license her natural freedom; woman. I believe that she would have con- and had lived two or three years with an aunt sented to be dressed like her grandmother, if in Edinburgh, so that she was become in a it would have made her seem as old. But all manner reconciled to civilization; beside she was in vain; time only could cure her obsti- had a natural taste for elegance and refinenate youthfulness of form and expression, and ment, and gave her whole attention and free time travelled rather slower with the idle girl will to the difficult task of beginning at twenty than he had been used to do with the busy to conquer the rudiments of French and Italian, one; so that, after a few days' display of her and music and drawing. The second sister gay plumage, she wearied of her airs and her weathered the storm almost equally well, finery, and withdrew as much as possible from though in a different manner. She was so her old companions, to partake of the larger overflowing with health and spirits, so fearsociety and more varied amusements amongst less and uncaring, so good humouredly open which she began to be introduced. Three in confessing her deficiencies, and so wisely months after, she reappeared in the schoolroom quite a different creature, absent, pensive, languishing, silly beyond her usual silliness, and in great want of a sympathising friend. She soon found one of course; every "Tilburina, mad in white satin," may make sure of a "confidante mad in white dimity." She soon found a friend, a tall, sleepy-eyed girl, as simple as herself-and then the closetings, the note-writings, the whisperings, the

regardless of lectures and exhortations, that she won her way through the turmoil of lessons and masters, without losing an atom of her hardihood and buoyancy. To be sure she learned nothing; but there was no great harm in that. Her youngest sister was not so fortunate-Oh, that charming sister Anne! They were all fine tall young women, but Anne was something more. I never saw any thing so lovely as her bright blooming complexion, her