not struck terror into the minds of the Lincolnshire cattle-sellers. The massacre at Vellore, like most other massacres, was an event without a parallel in Indian history; the Black Hole of Calcutta is no longer in existence; the voyage to India is as easy and as safe as the voyage to Margate or Calais; tigers and other wild beasts are only seen by those who go after them; the medical men in India are most of them superior to your favourite Dr. Scammony; and I always find, that they who come home from India, are in a great hurry to get back again."

After delivering this learned and argumentative speech, Mr. Pultuney looked into his wife's face, with an expression of countenance that said, “Has not this convinced you, my love."

But Mrs. Pultuney was not easily convinced; India, in her mind, was a sort of colonized Pandamonium, and nothing could divest her of an opinion that she might as well apprentice her son to a chimney-sweeper as to the United Company of East India Merchants.

"And then to lose the dear boy," exclaimed Mrs. Pultuney.

"Ah! there it is," responded Mr. Pultuney, with a sigh. "A heavy loss,-very heavy, I acknowledge."

"Just as he is becoming so interesting, so companionable," sighed Mrs. Pultuney, and as she said this some dim notions entered her mind of a tree,

a flower, and a gazelle, but as she could not remember the precise words, she was not equal to the quotation.

"Yes," said Mr. Pultuney, "'twill be a sore trial, but 'tis one all parents must endure; we cannot keep him with us for ever. I wish with all my heart we could," and Mr. Pultuney was seized with an intense longing to possess Fortunatus's night cap.

After this there was a great deal of desultory argument, of which the gentleman had the best, and had any one been listening at the key-hole, he might have elicited from the conversation much knowledge of Mr. Pultuney's circumstances; he might have learnt that Mr. Pultuney was a younger brother, that he belonged to no particular profession; that he lived upon an annuity, proceeding from certain shares in a mercantile house, of which his father had been one of the partners; that Mr. Pultuncy's elder brother was a gentleman of large property, who, at the age of fifty-three, having remained single up to that epoch, had taken it into his head to marry and get an heir, very much to the disappointment of our Mr. Pultuney and his family; that the elder Mr. Pultuney had always manifested a particular affection for his nephew Peregrine, which caused the younger Mr. Pultuney and his wife to look upon Master Peregrine Pultuney as an embryo squire; that Master Peregrine, like his father, had an elder brother, who was then

preparing for Oxford; that Mr. Pultuney's income was insufficient to send another son to the University; that he had some interest with the Court of Directors, and thought, under existing circumstances, it would not be an imprudent step to get Master Peregrine an appointment to India, and thereby provide for him for life.

It was solely upon the ground of expediency that Mr. Pultuncy conducted his arguments-" Needs must when a certain gentleman drives," is a proverb of old standing, and Mr. Pultuney heaped up, on this aphorism as a basis, a towering structure of ratiocinative eloquence, which so far prevailed with Mrs. Pultuney, that she gave her consent to the banishment, provided the dear boy was of opinion that such a step would conduce to his happiness.

Just at this interesting crisis, Master Peregrine entered the room. To say the least of him he was a young gentleman of no ordinary pretensions. No reasonable man in the three kingdoms could possibly object to the possession of a dozen such sons as this, though beef were a shilling a pound. He had just come in from cricket, and it is not an improbable conjecture that he had left his jacket, and waistcoat in the hall, for he appeared without either in the breakfast-room. His white jean trowsers which, it must be acknowledged were very well made, showed sundry green patches at the knee, indicative of sharp fielding-long stop, or point,

or something: his shirt was hanging somewhat loosely about his hips, and his handkerchief still more loosely about his neck, and altogether he was in that sort of elegant negligé which gentlemen's costume are wont to assume, at the termination of a long innings.

Thus much for the boy's apparel, which, it must be confessed, was not calculated in any great degree to set off his personal charms; yet, nevertheless, Mrs. Pultuney's bosom swelled with maternal pride and affection, as she contemplated her second son. A fine thick head of light hair, which all the cricket in the world could never put out of curl, large bluish grey eyes, with a come-and-have-some-funwith-me expression; a fair, clear complexion, somewhat heightened by the exercise resulting from some six-and-thirty runs "off his own bat," besides those of his companions, and a very pleasant sort of full lipped kiss-and-smile mouth, were amongst his principal facial adornments. His figure was precisely of that order, which fashionable tailors delight in, and schoolboys call "girlish,” for he had a small waist and large hips, and Mrs. Pultuney declared he was "her own son," a fact no one ever disputed, because he was blessed with those aristocratic appendages which are commonly called small hands and feet.

And such was the hero of our work, at the epoch whence our history commences; though we have forgotten to state that he carried a cricket bat

over his shoulder, and was just fourteen years of

age.

"Well, papa,”-these were his first words, as he flung open the breakfast-room door, "six-and-thirty runs off my own bat, and we beat them in one innings. I tossed up with Charles Hitemwell, but he was out first ball. Famous game, you can't think," and with sundry other interesting details of this kind, Master Peregrine entertained his pa

rents.

The young gentleman had scarcely concluded his graphic account of their juvenile cricket club, when Mrs. Pultuney, behind whose chair he was standing with one hand over its back, took hold of the said hand and was about to convey it to her lips, with some remark or other about its whiteness, and its similitude to her own, when all on a sudden she let it drop, and exclaimed, with an aspect of horror, "Gracious Heavens, it is all over blood?"

Now this, though not at all an extraordinary circumstance, as every woman who has had sons must know, is one which, in spite of its frequency, strikes terror into a mother's heart. Mrs. Pultuney was very much alarmed, and asked her husband to ring the bell.

Her first idea was to send for a doctor, and to ring for the footman was the preliminary step; perhaps her next thought would have been to do a