without a little perturbation, after the volley of words he had received, the letter presented to him; which ran as follows:--

"Little Babylon, Nov. 30th, 18—.

"Excellent Sir,

"Knowing from the newspapers that you are a great friend of internal improvements and canals in general, and being myself president of a company formed to get our legislature to connect Tenmile-pond with Little-eel-creek, I make bold to introduce to your better acquaintance my learned friend and pastor, also the principal of our academy, and whose works on law, trigonometry, divinity, and statistics, you must have read often, the Reverend Hercules Firkins, D. D., principal as aforesaid, and president of the Athenian Lycæum of this town, as also of the societies for the suppression of intemperance and political economy. I entirely approve myself of your political course, as does our friend, Dr. Firkins; whom you will find a very agreeable acquaintance.

66

"Your sincere friend,

"HIRAM JINKS."

Jinks, Jinks---Firkins, Perkins," here uttered Mr. Moreton in soliloquy-"patent ploughs--re

6

"Yes, yes, sir, Firkins, the same Reverend Dr. Firkins, the veritable Amphytrion, as Moliere says. Quæ regio in terris non nostri conscia laboris !" I had no doubt you had heard of me. You must have read in the reports my great argument in the case of Rhode Island Butter-churns, Peabody and Huskins versus Peck, though the reporter did me injustice; for he summed up the whole in a page, when I took five hours and forty minutes to deliver it, made twenty-seven points, and cited all the authorities, dicta, and elementary treatises on the law of Patents, from the Year Books and Yelverton, down to this fiddling and foolish reporter himself. It was a case, sir, which had a great bearing on morals and divinity, and which, in fact, first led me to change my profession. Yes, sir, it was the inferences antagonistically eveloped by my mind, in arguing that case, together with the study of the works of the great Oecolompadius, with which you are doubtless familiar, that induced me to make my forensic arms yield to the ecclesiastical toga. But, pardon me, sir, you can hardly have breakfasted !”

"No, sir. But allow me to ask what special business has suspended your pastoral, legal, and scientific labours; and in what way I can be of service to you?"

"That is the point, sir, to which I am to come.

I am 6

ap

But I must persist in your first finishing your breakfast, in which I will join you. petens jentaculi' myself; and am not one of those who, as the immortal Burke says, 'dream of canonizing mind by divorcing it from matter." " "The sentiment is just, though I really do not recollect the passage."

"But you must recollect, sir, the powerfully analytic, and irrefragably argumentative article on Education, in the last Quarterly Review, by my friend Southey, in which the subject is handled."

"Well, Dr. Perkins, if you will be kind enough to take a seat at my breakfast table, you will find in our small mess, Judge Dash and Colonel Asterisks, with other intelligent gentlemen, whom you doubtless know by reputation. We can then discuss, more at length, such suggestions as you may desire to offer."

So Mr. Moreton gravely and gracefully ushered the Reverend Dr. Firkins up to the breakfast parlour; where several gentlemen, worthy of special notice, which I have no time to bestow, were paying more or less attention to the accumulated luxuries of an American public table. There were tea, coffee, beef-steaks, oysters, eggs, ham and eggs, sausages, devilled turkeys-bread, wheaten, Indian, and rye, and mixed of all, pancakes and buckwheat cakes, rivalling those far-famed ones of Penn

sylvanian Chester-hoe-cakes and Johnny-cakes, with the interminable variety of Indian cakes, known to the Virginia kitchen-together with the appropriate condiments of sugars, domestic and foreign, molasses, honey, pepper-vinegar, and moûtard de Maille. One of the honourable members present was reading the copious notes of a speech he intended to make the next day; while another was reading a communication written by himself, in praise of his own speeches, and published in a paper from his own district; while two others, to the speeches of both of whom the public paid more attention than they did themselves, were engaged in a deep discussion on the question, whether the oysters grew to fit the shell, or the shell to fit the oyster.

Mr. Moreton had no particular faculty of remembering new names. He introduced his guest

as the Reverend Mr. Jinkins.

"Doctor Firkins, if you please, sir;" said the new importation, plumping himself down between the two disputants-" Principal of Clio Hall, Little Babylon, and President of the Athenian Lyceum of the same place, and of the societies for suppressing intemperance, political economy, et cætera. Coffee, madam, if you please-Ha! 'aut Erasmus aut Diabolus!' I'll thank you, Mr.

Moreton, for a bit of that devil-the devil in shape of a broiled turkey." Being accommodated with these and other items, he looked round him, and exclaimed-" Doctor Johnson was in error, pace tanti viri,' when he observed of his breakfast in Scotland, where the tea and coffee were accompanied, not only with bread and butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades;' that "if an epicure could remove by a wish, wherever he had supped, he would breakfast in Scotland.' The real gastronome can only expatiate at discretion, at the matin meal in America."

The two oyster disputants smiled, and sipped their tea; when Dr. Firkins suddenly interrupted them, by rising, with an impetus which jarred the whole table, and rapidly transferring his leg of turkey from the right hand to the left, he clapped the former on the polished and half-bald forehead of Mr. Moreton, exclaiming, "What a bowl of intellect!" Having thus anointed the sinciput of the representative, he sat down with like rapidity, and for some time proceeded in silence with his provisions.

"Well, Mr. Moreton," said he, after a brief interval, "I perceive you are impatient to hear my communications."-I have no time to let the doctor deliver himself in his own way; and have already